A Large Negro wrote:
> Hello,

> In particular I would like to apply something called GPGPU to POVRay.
> GPGPU stands for General Purpose processing on a GPU. More information
> on GPGPU can be found here:  http://www.gpgpu.org 

Find me a GPU with double precision floating point, and you might make a 
start.  Currently, they're only just now (or maybe in the last year or 
so) supporting single-precision through the entire pipeline.  Given that 
most people are still running cards that don't even have that, I doubt 
NVidia or ATI will soon be releasing double-precision cards.

Anyway, the paralelization of GPUs is different from what is needed for 
POV-Ray.  True, GPUs have parralel pipelines - that are usually doing 
the same thing.  Even if they are working on different pixels, they're 
usually at least running the same program.  You wouldn't call different 
shaders for different pixels.  For POV-Ray, this might be needed, due to 
the interdependance of most scene elements (thanks to refraction, 
reflection, etc).  The only way to do this under the current GPU 
paradigm would be to write a shader that contains the *whole* of 
POV-Ray, and let it loose.

...Chambers

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