In article <web.41860bcbb4bdbd0d563d27f50@news.povray.org>,
 "Ghost_Dog" <gho### [at] hotmailcom> wrote:

> maybe this is a stupid question (and a waste of your 3d card if I'm right),
> but couldn't you draw meshes and flat, simple shapes (i.e boxes)with the 3d
> card and take a bit of the load off the main CPU?
> I guess it's not so much of a problem nowadays, but a co-processor would
> probably be a godsend too..

You could, but:
1) it would only work for shapes that can easily be tessellated. Shapes 
that are typically very fast to raytrace anyway.

2) it would only work for the first-level camera rays. No help on 
reflections, transparency, shadows, and the other stuff that accounts 
for the main slowdowns with raytracing. It also will only work with 
orthographic and perspective cameras.

3) meshes are very fast to raytrace, and get better as they get larger. 
A mesh twice as big will take twice as long for a scanline engine to 
draw, but may only take a small fraction longer with a raytracer.

4) it would make POV-Ray far more dependent on the hardware, and require 
a complete redesign of the core code. You would also likely get 
precision problems...depth buffers aren't floating point.

Basically, you're putting lots of work into improving the parts that 
least need improvement, and introducing a lot of new problems in the 
process.

-- 
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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