Thanks, Chris.
    Still, the real world is really made of little parts and no part knows what
the others are really doing except by the four forces.  I know that the optics
would be complex and yes, that everything is interdependent.
    Couldn't a sort of "illumination sphere" be derived by a front end processor
and made available to all the sub-processors?  I know that the light from other
parts of the scene are important to the realism, but overall it tends to be
rather blended together for many scenes, or at least that was my impression.
    I may be way off track here, but it should be possible to have a processor
that calculates each light source and renders partial results to the tile
processors.  And another processor that renders a sort of "light density and
direction" map that would be passed down.  Even if it only used an approximation
based on boundaries or something, it would be pretty fast.
    I once worked with a thing called the GAPP (geometric array parallel
processor) a little, and some sort of massively parallel pipeline for
illumination/shadows/photons may be possible, in concert with another parallel
that splits the scene into the tiles.  Then the pool of data would be present
for each part of the scene.
    Well, my little outlandish bit of nonsense for now.

Cheers!

Chip Shults
My robotics, space and CGI web page - http://home.cfl.rr.com/aichip

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