> Huh?  They might use the 3-D acceleration techniques found in your video
card to
> display their GUI and stuff, but rendering still happens in the CPU,
AFAIK.

Well, certain calculations are done on the Graphics
Hardware, e.g. triangle-calculations, Z-Buffering and
such. That's at least what I've learned in my Computer
Graphics Course. After all, the 3D-Hardware is supposed
to do triangle-stuff, why not make use of it?

> Riiiiight.  Radiosity and photons aren't even possible without rendering
the
> image in multple passes with most of those expensive packages.

Still, Radiosity on patches is, AFAIK, faster to calculate
than "our" radiosity, because of the speed in which an
entire image can be produced faster. We've dealt with
radiosity calculations based on triangle in above mentioned
CG-Class. Can you believe that a level 3 radiosity pass
can be made in Realtime? You only lose about 5 fps or so.
(Though this greatly depends on Hardware and Technique
applied).
Photons is a completely different matter, but again, lightmaps
are used very often for this, which may be stored and require
less memory than millions of photons...

> Modellers exist for POV.
Moray? SPatch? Yeah, some do exist. But can they really
compete with Lightwave, Maya, etc? I'm not so sure about
that.
(AFAIK though, Maya has a POV-Ray Plug-In...)

> YMMV.  I've tried a few of the other packages, and still prefer POV.

What does YMMV mean? Aside of that, I have yet to find
a renderer with such a good combination of price vs usability... ;-)

-- 
Tim Nikias v2.0
Homepage: http://www.digitaltwilight.de/no_lights
Email: tim.nikias (@) gmx.de


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