Another point to make is that most games don't use raytracing since until 
relatively recently the hardware architecture needed to implement a true 
raytracer in a graphics cards would have required something 3 times the 
size of a normal card. There is only one that I have even heard rumored 
to have been made and it is used in movie production, cost tens of 
thousands of dollars to buy and was nearly the size of a laptops entire 
motherboard. With the number of component we could fit into a new card 
the result would be no bigger than an existing NVidia card, however the 
development time needed to produce the chip, make sure it was stable and 
then pray that game companies that are used to using the cheats supplied 
through OpenGL and DirectX will actually use it makes the odds of anyone 
seeing such a card on the market any time soon very unlikely. The irony 
being that in many cases you have to upload large chunks of additional 
geometry and pre-made textures every few seconds in a game, while a true 
raytrace engine would only have to upload terrain geometry and those 
textures you couldn't produce using procedural systems (which for most 
games would be maybe 10% of them...) If you couldn't get a jump in speed 
and frame rate from have 90% of your data remain in-place throughout most 
of the game then you may as well not even bother trying. lol And most 
experts believe that short of a major increase in the size or speed of 
data transfer, the latest generation of cards are close to the physical 
limit of what they can improve on.

Hmm. Maybe there is a market for a true raytracing based card after 
all...

Not that any of the above addresses the central issue, which as everyone 
else has said, is that there is not likely to be a major improvement in 
speed or memory use from what you are planning to do. Or which in the 
case of memory couldn't be accomplished by a method of trading out stuff 
that POVRay doesn't specifically need at any given moment.

-- 
void main () {

    call functional_code()
  else
    call crash_windows();
}

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