>>Actually, that's an interesting point... Would presumably mean the very 
>>first frame still takes 20 minutes, and all the subsequent ones are 
>>reasonably fast unless/until you expose new geometry.
> 
> 
> therefore it is entirely possible that, as counterintuitive as it may seem,
> there is potential for a scene with global illumination to be *faster* in
> interactive rendering than one without.

That's the pretty interesting point... global illumination might 
actually be faster. At least, *after* the cache has been built. (For a 
single frame, the time taken to build the cache usually makes the 
overall rendertime [drastically] slower than "normal mode". But if 
you're reusing that data for an animation... sure.)


OOC, how does POV-Ray efficiently retrive radiosity samples during 
rendering? (I thought about writing a renderer myself, but I couldn't 
think of a fast lookup algorithm.) Presumably the same problem applies 
to photon maps also...?

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