> GPU acceleration will be useful when the following conditions are met:
> 1) Support for sophisticated branching
> 2) Full double-precision accuracy
> 3) Large memory sets (other than textures)
> 4) Independent shaders running on distinct units.

I think all those conditions are already met.  For me the only barrier to 
not implementing POV on the GPU is the developer effort needed, and the risk 
that it might be wasted if the overall technology changes of programming 
GPUs in the next 5-10 years.

Maybe there are some small problems that have to be worked around, but IMO 
GPUs are powerful enough today to run something like POV.  I already made 
demo applications that do raytraced spheres and isosurfaces on the GPU (and 
my GPU is not even a modern one, it still has certain limitations), so I'm 
pretty sure something *could* written in OpenCL or CUDA on a new GPU and 
would handle POV fine, including all primitives and texturing.  It's just 
the effort needed, and whether it will all be wasted in 5 years when 
something new appears.

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