In article <3ea29431@news.povray.org> , Andreas Kreisig <and### [at] gmxde> 
wrote:

> I'm not familiar with rendering algorithms, but aren't there any rendering
> systems available(e.g. Pixar's Renderman wich is a hybrid renderer) wich
> are able to pipe the input so that the memory is not the limited factor?

Of course you can always parallelize either process, random memory access
does not scale well at all.  Memory access is the limit even for
ray-tracing, and for scanline rendering hardware the memory access is the
reason why memory hardware is much faster than main system memory.  But
there are limits to the memory speed, which are physical and somewhere
around 50-100 times of what is possible today (because the signal can't
travel faster than light).  So those absolute limits will be reached really
soon for classic integrated circuits; and already the high-frequency
characteristics of memory bus signals cause a lot of problems...

    Thorsten

____________________________________________________
Thorsten Froehlich, Duisburg, Germany
e-mail: tho### [at] trfde

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