>> Gelato uses undocumented proprietary GPU commands on the cards.
>
> I think you are mistaken here. nVidia has lots of info about how to 
> program their GPUs, just go to the developer section, they have lots of 
> MegaBytes of info and a free developer enviroment, downloadable.

NVidia wants developers to use Gelato, or more generally CUDA.
NVidia wants to control who does or doesn't know about the
primitive commands used to access the GPU.
It's right in the CUDA license...

"Object Code:  Developer agrees not to disassemble, decompile
or reverse engineer the Object Code versions of any of the Materials.
Developer acknowledges that certain of the Materials provided in
Object Code version may contain third party components that
may be subject to restrictions, and expressly agrees not to attempt to
modify or distribute such Materials without first receiving consent
from NVIDIA."

Although I can't locate it at the moment, there was a statement
in some of the online docs about Gelato using special (non-Cuda)
commands to speed up some of their rendering.

So it might be possible to build some acceleration into POV via
the CUDA SDK, but you would have to request permission from
NVidia in order to distribute it, and Gelato will always be faster.

Historically, 3D modelers that can output to POV have used
Open-GL as a preview, in order to do that they provide a
tesselation of POV primitives to Open-GL.  There is no reason
why a modeler couldn't use DirectX as a preview as well, though
that makes it Windows specific.

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