scott wrote:
>> 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

Yeah, I'm reading about it now. (Hmm, I guess I'm not the only person 
who still thinks 512 MB RAM is a lot. ;-)

>> 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.

nVidia GeForce 200 series is ment to offer double-precision when driven 
using CUDA...

> 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).

It's a completely different algorithm to be sure. The mathematics is 
simple enough - it's figuring out how to make it efficient on real-world 
hardware that's the hard part. ;-)

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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