John VanSickle <evi### [at] hotmailcom> wrote:
> the ray-tracing algorithm requires that all of the scene geometry exist 
> in memory all at once.

  I don't think that's true. You can have bounding boxes for objects loaded
into memory instead of the objects themselves, and test against those boxes.
Only if the box is hit you load the object itself into memory and test the
ray against it. This process can be cached so that least used objects can
be dropped from memory.

  Other optimizations can be used as well: For example, if an object is
far enough (looks very small from the point of view of the origin of the
current ray being traced), a billboard graphic can be used instead of the
object itself. (Or, in some cases, the object could be ignored completely.)

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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