"Michael Goldshteyn" <mgo### [at] n-o-s-p-a-m-earthlinknet> wrote in
message news:3ee74af9$2@news.povray.org...
> Most modern PCs have a very powerful 3d video card with a GPU that is
> hundreds if not thousands of times faster than the CPU for certain
> calculations. I was thinking if some of the POV computations could be
> offloaded to the GPU, we could speed up renders by a very large factor.
The
> big question is one of which routines thouse would be and which chunks of
> the GPU could be utilized. Certainly matrix operations could be offloaded
at
> the very least, although I don't know to what extent that would improve
> performance. It's just a shame that there is this uber-powerful floating
> point processor sitting in most PCs that can't be used to help things move
> along. What do others think?

The GPU itself is designed for a different pipeline.  It's not like a
coprocessor; that is, you can't just send vertices to it and get the
transformed vertices back.  You *can* process the vertices on the card, and
then have the card draw them.

...Chambers

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