>> Would it be possible to use the GPU as well as the CPU to render?  This
>> could speed up render times so much and would allow a somewhat crappy
>> machine to generate some pretty spiffy results.
> 
> Whilst I agree with what others have written here, it seems nobody has 
> thought about the fact that by the time POV4 is released 3D cards will 
> have progressed several generations.
> 
> IMO we shouldn't totally rule out using the GPU to help with 
> high-quality renderings just because of some limitation that might not 
> even be there in 5 years time.  You only have to have a look at the 
> feature-list of the different shader versions over the last 5 years to 
> see the way it's going (btw loops are fine in both vertex and pixel 
> shaders now, and there is no limit on the number of instructions like 
> there used to be).
> 
> Also look at nVidia's Gelato, they use the 3D card to help with 
> rendering, so it can't be all bad.  Maybe there is some technical paper 
> somewhere about what Gelato does that would give some ideas for POV4?
> 

Agreed. I suggest not adding GPU support until there are GPUs that can 
actually do that, but leave appropriate hooks and stubs on the code to 
easily add it whenever we're ready :)

For realtime previews, I think the best way is having the Object class 
(and all the concrete objects that extend it like Sphere) have a 
Tesselate method along with Trace_Ray and Point_Inside (well, whatever 
they're called; you get the idea).

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