>> I was thinking more about how to store the scene on the GPU efficiently, 
>> if you just have a triangle list it is relatively simple.
>
> Again, depends on whether you're writing a shader, or using a GPGPU 
> system.

It still runs on the same hardware though, which is highly optimised for 
graphics operations, you need to be aware of this no matter how you shape 
your code.

> But they don't allow recursion.

Yes that was what I said earlier, for something like raytracing to unlimited 
depths I think the CPU needs to step in every so often to process the 
current set of rays (ie kill and spawn rays where appropriate).

Of course if you want to limit yourself to a fixed depth (ie a max trace 
level of 8 or whatever) then you can "unroll" the recursion so it works on 
the GPU.  Might not be as efficient as letting the CPU do it though.

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