> Mmm, I'm seeing *a lot* of references to the PS3 in relation to high 
> performance computing. I know nothing about it, but from the sheer weight 
> of references, I'm guessing it's moderately well-equipted?

There's a nice article on Wikipedia about the processor

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_processor

> Actually, just porting POV-Ray to run on a GPU would probably yield some 
> interesting speedups. You'd have to radically restructure the program to 
> take advantage of the way GPUs work, but it should be quite fast...

The problem is still floating point precision on the GPU - wait until they 
get double precision throughout the pipeline and we'll begin to see some 
interesting stuff.  Also, as Warp always mentions, realistic multi-level 
reflections and refractions are not simple at all (compared to the basic 
"environment mapping" that almost every game uses).

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