scott wrote:
>>> Hopefully someone will try its hand at least to speed up povray 
>>> triangle handling.
>>>
>> It would be extremely difficult to handle triangles, and e.g. spheres 
>> or isosurfaces consistently if you use different ways of computing them.
> 
> Yes, unless you do the whole lot on the GPU you're going to get bogged 
> down with CPU<>GPU communications.
> 
> If you converted POV to run on the GPU then it would take a huge amount 
> of work and would no longer be as portable as it is today.

But would be much faster!  Take a look here:

http://vimeo.com/8487987

it's an experimental and limited port of the open-source unbiased 
renderer Luxrender to OpenCL.  Experimental or not and OpenCL being very 
early and not mature enough, it already boasts an incredible boost over 
CPU-only code!

Can you imagine what povray could do comparatively without getting 
boiled down by unbiased techniques?!

CUDA would limit portability, but not OpenCL.

> AFAIK the 
> POV team don't want either of those two things so it's not going to happen.

So that means povray will be the slowest raytracer around, is that 
right?  Good Lord, it's sad that 3.7 is not out yet and it was once one 
of the fastest and first raytracers to go multicore... now it's being 
beaten by unbiased renderers!

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