> In article <47973c65@news.povray.org>, sau### [at] netscapenet says...
>> Why you say no when CPU-GPU combos are been used in several applications 
>> like I listed, ray-tracing  or there are trends to use this combo to 
>> solve problems so I think is a yes, maybe is in very early stages but 
>> this is tending to evolve and could become common ground and open 
>> source. Why are you so negative about it? What would make you think in a 
>> yes?
>>
> As Warp says, its not really designed for recursive raytracing. There 
> **are** hybrid applications that do fairly decent results, which 
> probably do use it to speed things up a bit, **however** those systems 
> are intended for production level systems, where speed is considered 
> more important than realism. Since POVRay's primary goal is to generate 
> the more realistic physical model possible, and short cuts that could be 
> used to produce a movie, or the like, by side stepping, short cutting, 
> or even ignoring, certain methods, in favor of speed, are "not" the 
> intended goal here. Mind you, I wouldn't mind some of those short cuts, 
> since its damn near impossible to do some things the "right" way, and 
> certainly not in a sane span of time. But, short of adding those in as 
> optional, so those in "production" level fields could use them, while 
> leaving the normal methods intact, there isn't a benefit to the intent 
> of the project to do that.

I'm a quality over quantity demanding person, so this is just fine for 
me, altough a speeding the rough/test/WIP/preview scenes could be very 
good to improve the creativity you can achieve with POV-Ray. I would 
never would want to downgrade output of POV-Ray just to speed it up with 
a GPU except just for rough/test/WIP/preview.

I think could be useful to call funtions of the raytracer directly over 
selected objects with local (per scene) parameter just to see the 
effects of those functions and better understand them and then use the 
more appropriates ones. Just a thought.

> About half the people here would scream bloody murder and try to beat 
> you to death with a checker plane

LOL :) You've been ray-tracing too long when you make jokes like this, 
very good one. :)

> if you tried to add shortcuts, never 
> mind that there aren't a lot of free rendering systems that are as good, 
> and also use those short cuts. Most of the other half would still be 
> busy sharpening the edges of their triangle primitives, just in case 
> your suggestion did break the physical based systems already in there. 
> lol But, I think you see what I am getting at. Even if some of us would 
> find it useful to take short cuts, its *not* what the program is 
> supposed to be designed for, and what it *is* intended for isn't 
> functionally possible in current GPUs.

I see. As I wrote, I would like this only as rough/test/WIP/preview, 
specially if the rough/test/WIP/preview could be rendered fast or in 
real-time. The final output is and should always be SLOW for HIGHEST 
quality purposes, which I enjoy very much. Actually I enjoy rendering 
POV-Ray images slowly, since version 1.0 (which I still have), since 
real-time Virtual Reality renderers are impossible for most if not all 
of us, getting only one frame of VR slow is just fine for me :)

Post a reply to this message