Patrick Elliott wrote:
> 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."

Modern GPUs are very programmable; they aren't tied to scanline rendering
anymore. Ever heard of protein folding on GPUs?

Raytracing *can* be done in GPUs.
See http://www.clockworkcoders.com/oglsl/rt/

However it would be a HUGE amount of work to modify POV-Ray to run on CUDA /
OpenCL. Lots of algorithms would need to be rewritten from scratch, and a
few may be impossible.

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