Kevin Wampler wrote:
> Chambers wrote:
>> JAppleyard wrote:
>>> People are doing raytracing on CUDA already
>>
>> With fixed recursion levels.  Not good enough.
> 
> Although I don't really think it's worth the POV-team's limited time 
> working on it, raytracing with limited recursion levels (and maybe other 
> restrictions) on the GPU could be very useful for fast lower-quality 
> renders used while modeling a scene -- similar to the current Quality=n 
> setting.

The problem really is that the entire engine would need to be rewritten 
from scratch to work this way.  Considering that it is not yet clear if 
GPGPUs (General Purpose Graphics Processing Units... isn't that an 
oxymoron?) will perform better in such branching conditions than more 
traditional multicore processors (Intel doesn't think so, which is why 
they're working on Larrabee), the amount of work necessary just isn't 
worth it for a partial implementation.

...Chambers

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