> 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 :)

Yep, exactly my thinking.  Not even considering GPU rendering when writing 
POV4 would be a bit of a mistake IMO.  Just like if you started coding a big 
project a year or two ago without any thinking of future support for 
multi-core...

> 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).

Yes that sounds sensible, it's not actually very hard to tesselate the POV 
primitives, even the isosurface is pretty straightforward when you use a 
finite volumetric grid.  Of course for infinite objects you would need to 
bound them, but seeing as in GPU rendering you need to specify a "far" plane 
anyway, you would just clip your objects to that.

The materials shouldn't be too hard either, just the effort of porting the 
pigment/finish code over to pixel shaders.

Lights and shadows should be easy enough.  Multi-level reflections would be 
almost impossible, but first-level reflections should be doable for preview 
quality.

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