scott wrote:
>> FWIW, I think it would certainly be interesting to have unbaised 
>> rendering as an option on POV-Ray. But the amount of work required is, 
>> realistically, prohibitive. You'd have to basically rewrite the whole 
>> program. And I don't see that happening any time soon...
> 
> Not just the rendering method, but things like different reflection and 
> lighting models, newer methods of increasing the efficiency of ray 
> tracing (I posted a link in the pov4 group), etc.

OK. I wasn't aware that any existed, but hey.

> Given that most 
> people seem to think SDL is POV's strongest point, why not improve the 
> SDL to be more flexible?

Sounds good to me...

>>> You do realise that the big rock in the Cascades demo is an isosurface?
>>
>> Really? I thought it was just a tellesated triangle mesh based on an 
>> isosurface? (Remember, I haven't actually been able to watch the demo 
>> yet.)
> 
> Well yes, of course, nothing can directly show an isosurface, even POV 
> has to sample the function to generate pixels.  But my point was it 
> shows an isosurface in realtime, in fine detail.

My point is that usually, no matter how closely you look at a POV-Ray 
isosurface, it will always be beautifully smooth. Every NURBS demo I've 
ever seen for a GPU has been horribly tesellated with sharp edges 
everywhere. Sure, if you had several billion polygons, maybe you could 
almost approach what POV-Ray gives you... but presumably that would 
require slightly more than 256 MB of video RAM.

POV-Ray, of course, gets round this problem by using more sophisticated 
mathematical techniques than simply projecting flat polygons onto a 2D 
framebuffer. I've yet to see any GPU attempt this.

>> OOC... Clearly Crysis has some pretty serious graphics. But is it 
>> *fun* to play?
> 
> I only played the demo, and it was in a bit of a rush, seemed pretty 
> similar *gameplay* to FarCry, which isn't a bad thing.  Played fine on 
> my nVidia 7900 card, I think I had low or medium detail and it was above 
> 30fps most of the time.  I think you'd need to play a few levels before 
> any new gameplay became apparent, just IMO.

Mmm, OK. Well my graphics card is only a GeForce 7800 GTX, so I had 
assumed it would be too under-powered to play it at much about 0.02 FPS. 
 From the way people talk about Crysis, I was under the impression that 
you need a four-way SLI rig of 8900GTX GPUs just to make it get out of 
bed... Apparently it's not as bad as that.



-- 
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