>>Presumably you need either a trivially simple scene or a 64-core server 
>>to get truely "real time" performance from this...?
> 
> 
>   I haven't tested this yet, but what is your definition of "trivially
> simple"?

Well, that's the key really, isn't it?

I was thinking along the lines of something that doesn't involve any 
surfaces more complicated than quadratic, no surface texturing of any 
kind, no reflection or refraction, no media, radiosity, photons or focal 
blur, and a fairly small number of objects ( < 500 or so). That, 
presumably, should be simple enough to run in realtime.

In fact, I've built scenes like this, and as you say, if you turn off 
enough stuff you can get "almost realtime" rendering if your PC is a big 
enough brute. And yes, I would imagine disabling the parser makes it 
faster still. (Although on the other hand, how long does it take to 
parse half a page of text?)

Now if you could get a *cluster* of PCs to chew on the problem in 
parallel, you might be able to render "non-trivial" scenes in almost 
realtime. (I would think for faster speeds the network overhead would 
loose more than the extra CPU power gains.) As I understand it, there is 
absolutely no plan whatsoever to add this kind of thing to POV-Ray - at 
least, not in this release anyway.

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