> In short: The rendering speed of a CPU of these days is within the
> measurement-tolerance of an actual (not so actual ... HD 7990) graphics card.

...

> They do NOT have currently such a
> nice rendering SDL like POV-Ray.

That is not a coincidence.

GPUs are excellent for writing a simple raytracer that runs very fast. 
By simple, I mean only supporting one type of simple shape (eg mesh, 
isosurface, sphere), no CSG, no general procedural textures, only one or 
two types of light in a scene etc. The point is the code that is run on 
the GPU is very specific, and the GPU hardware then excels at running 
this exact code millions of times on different data.

However if you wanted to implement an SDL like POV-ray's, you would need 
code to handle every possible primitive shape (each shape needs it own 
intersection algorithm), every possible procedural texture, CSG, shadow 
and lighting algorithms for every possible finish and light type etc. 
Such a large bit of code, where each time it is "run", a different small 
portion is actually executed, is not well suited to a GPU at all.

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