In article <3ee74af9$2@news.povray.org>,
 "Michael Goldshteyn" <mgo### [at] n-o-s-p-a-m-earthlinknet> wrote:

> Most modern PCs have a very powerful 3d video card with a GPU that is
> hundreds if not thousands of times faster than the CPU for certain
> calculations. I was thinking if some of the POV computations could be
> offloaded to the GPU, we could speed up renders by a very large factor. The
> big question is one of which routines thouse would be and which chunks of
> the GPU could be utilized. Certainly matrix operations could be offloaded at
> the very least, although I don't know to what extent that would improve
> performance. It's just a shame that there is this uber-powerful floating
> point processor sitting in most PCs that can't be used to help things move
> along. What do others think?

As others have mentioned, because of precision issues, this isn't useful 
for geometry calculations. But more importantly, this isn't like a 
floating point coprocessor, it is a video card, and is designed to 
efficiently display things. Even if the card can do the operations 
faster, it will take far more time to send the data to the card to be 
processed and then retrieve it than it would to process the data on the 
CPU. There are some things it could accelerate, but typically not what 
POV needs.
With more programmable cards becoming available, you can do more 
general-purpose things with the card...it may be possible to process 
data in large enough chunks that it is worth it to use the card, maybe 
even doing all the raytracing on the card. However, you'd most likely 
have to design the raytracer around this, I don't see anyone converting 
POV to do it. And then you have the hardware dependencies, etc...

-- 
Christopher James Huff <cja### [at] earthlinknet>
http://home.earthlink.net/~cjameshuff/
POV-Ray TAG: chr### [at] tagpovrayorg
http://tag.povray.org/

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