Thorsten Froehlich <tho### [at] trfde> wrote:
> You have a misconception here: While for a scanline renderer there is a
> benefit as you can reduce the number of triangles, for ray-tracing you won't
> be able to reduce the number of triangles at all. they still need to be
> generated.

  Some scanline renderers support subdivision&displacement of the mesh
on the fly, while rendering. This means that only a small part of the
mesh needs to be subdivided at a time, and parts which have been already
rendered can be dropped. This keeps memory consumption low. This makes
it possible to render meshes which apparently consist of thousands of
millions of triangles, yet rendering them consumes only a few megabytes
of memory.

  Of course trying to do the same in a raytracing engine can be a bit
more complex.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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