Saul Luizaga <sau### [at] netscapenet> wrote:
> groaning is an emotional response and as such, irrational: I haven't 
> been  reading this NG for a long time and the first line of text I read 
> was your groaning, besides of the rudeness, it explains nothing, and 
> clarifies the same way.

  There are certain subjects which repeat themselves time after time when
some people think that they have an ingenious new idea which surely nobody
has even thought of before and thus they come here and write about it. For
the umpteenth time for regulars. Something which has already been discussed
like a million times to death. No wonder regulars are tired of explaining
the same thing over and over.

  At some point in the past, whem XML was all the hype, it was a rather
regular occurrence for someone to come here and suggest that povray's
scene description language would be changed to XML-conforming. No wonder
that after some time people just start responding to it with "no, that's
just a braindead idea" rather than going once again to minute details why
the idea doesn't work.

  To be fair, though, not all such ideas are unimplementable. The most
prominent example is multithreading: In the past it was again and again
suggested, and again and again shot down as unfeasible due to all the
povray features which are not thread-friendly. In a way, both views were
right: Yes, multithreading *is* implementable in povray (as demonstrated),
and yes, it *is* a huge, huge task (as also demonstrated). Not only did it
require an almost complete refactoring of the source code, but even after
all these years there are still minor problems to be solved because of the
problems introduced by multithreading.

  Using the GPU for rendering in povray is equally unfeasible, even though
for slightly different reasons. Mostly it has to do with GPU features (or
lack thereof) and the amount of data which would have to be constantly
transferred between the graphics card and the system RAM, which would most
probably nullify any theoretical speed advantage.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

Post a reply to this message