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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..
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"Ghost_Dog" <gho### [at] hotmail com> wrote:
>
> 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?
Hi,
see here why this does not work...
http://tag.povray.org/povQandT/miscQandT.html#3dcard
Greets, Mark
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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?
How do you expect the 3D-card to be able to render POV-Ray's procedural
textures, reflections, refractions, photons, radiosity and other similar
effects? And how do you expect the mesh to be reflected/refracted from
other objects? How do you expect the mesh to cast shadows (including
self-shadowing)? Meshes can also eg. contain media: How do you expect
it to be rendered? What if the camera has been set up for something the
3D-card is unable to handle, such as a spherical, ultra-wide-angle or a
panoramic camera, or if the camera as a 'normal' block?
--
#macro M(A,N,D,L)plane{-z,-9pigment{mandel L*9translate N color_map{[0rgb x]
[1rgb 9]}scale<D,D*3D>*1e3}rotate y*A*8}#end M(-3<1.206434.28623>70,7)M(
-1<.7438.1795>1,20)M(1<.77595.13699>30,20)M(3<.75923.07145>80,99)// - Warp -
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Now I'm wondering just what algorithms a 3D card does have that makes it
'impossible' to be used to raytrace...
...or it it merely 'utterly impractical'?
After all, you can do calculations to arbitrary precision the hard way,
it just isn't very fast compared to using inbuilt FPU abilities, and
reduces the 'using 3D card to increase rendering speed' to an absurdity,
but not an impossibility. If the 3D card is able to calculate even one
pixel in the time it takes the rest of the scene to be rendered
normally, it technically has sped up the total render speed.
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On a related note, if you go the reductio ad absurdum mathmatica route
and do number crunching with anything on the computer that can possibly
do so, could you raytrace with a sound card...?
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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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Tim Cook wrote:
> On a related note, if you go the reductio ad absurdum mathmatica route
> and do number crunching with anything on the computer that can
> possibly do so, could you raytrace with a sound card...?
Well, I don't know how advanced the latest sound cards are, but if you
imagine a reverb algorithm that takes some geometry of a room, position of
speakers, microphones etc then that it starting to sound scarily like ray
tracing.
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