Am 25.07.2011 09:49, schrieb jhu:
> http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2346334&cid=36867000
>
> This  particular post on slashdot was interesting. Mental Ray can use the GPU
> and throws thousands of threads at it mostly due to waiting for elements in main
>   memory. How feasible is this for Povray?

With the (very recent) release of the first (GP)GPU supporting both 
64-bit floats and recursion, adapting POV-Ray for (those) GPUs might 
actually become technically feasible soon (though it still may take 
quite some time before it hits the dev team's top priorities list).

An open question would still be that of performance, which will mainly 
depend on how well the software architecture fits with the "Extreme 
SIMD" ("Single Instruction Multiple Data") hardware architecture. We 
might see a positive surprise there, though it could just as well turn 
out a big disappointment.

In any case I think the easiest-to-implement approach (and hence the 
best approach for official POV-Ray) at GPU support would be to implement 
network rendering first (it's high up on the ToDo list anyway), and then 
treat the GPU as a separate rendering node.

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