In article <3eea3d3c@news.povray.org>,
 "Ray Gardener" <ray### [at] daylongraphicscom> wrote:

> > This has been done
> > before, and is actually slower on modern systems (there was a thread
> > about it recently on comp.graphics.rendering.raytracing). You go through
> > a lot of contortions to get it to work, and get a more limited, lower
> > quality, slower renderer as a result. Now do you see why?

Crap...thought I was replying to something else, and was thinking of 
64-bit fixed-point here. Single-precision floating point isn't slower, 
and even when the instructions execute in the same time, they take less 
cache and RAM space.


> I also checked the images to test quality, but found
> no discernable difference. No gaps, nothing.

Well, the scenes you tried only used planes, triangles, and spheres, 
which aren't very precision sensitive. I think you'd have a lot harder 
time with something like a torus, and a more complex, "real-world" scene.


> As for the primitives, yeah, Tachyon doesn't
> have the complex ones, but if it has enough,
> and one can get SIMD or GPU assist in the bargain,
> then that's not a bad little raytracer for some projects.
> I wouldn't mind having a "turbo option" for simple
> scenes in POV-Ray.

This would be extremely unlikely to happen...it would create a lot more 
maintenance work. Many things would have to be separately tuned, 
rewritten, or completely disabled for the single-precision version.

-- 
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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