Doom wrote:
> I was curious, with the OpenCL 1.0 spec, and also with ATI/AMD releasing
> open-source code now for utilizing the GPU processing power, could it be
> possible to utilize GPU acceleration within POV-Ray?  I know a lot of POV-Ray
> is CPU intensive and utilizing the threads in the GPU would drastically speed
> up render times.
> 
> anyones thoughts?
> 

This comes up about once a month. The practical answer is, "No, not 
really, since GPUs are optimized for the type of math that is used by 
scanline systems, not physics based raytracing, and their floating point 
systems are almost always using lower bit depth than the CPU of the same 
machine, so nearly everything POVRay does would fall in the category of, 
"Nope, the GPU can't do that, or if it did, it would produce results 
that are poorer than the FPU of the main processor."

Now, if you didn't mind getting "poorer" quality, and the *slight* speed 
increase you might get from it was worth it... maybe. But, unless its 
enough to give you real time, its not worth the effort, since the only 
reason you might want to downgrade the results, to get better 
performance, is as a game engine. And actually, I kind of wish you could 
do that. I am getting seriously tired of things like the layers alpha BS 
in Second Life, which a raytracer would never have in the first place. lol

-- 
void main () {

     if version = "Vista" {
       call slow_by_half();
       call DRM_everything();
     }
     call functional_code();
   }
   else
     call crash_windows();
}

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