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5 Oct 2024 15:07:14 EDT (-0400)
  hrmgrblRADIOSITYgrmblgrr3.6rmbl3.7BETAumblgrrrrrr....  
From: clipka
Date: 6 Apr 2009 13:25:00
Message: <web.49da3ae44aea197b2b82b7c80@news.povray.org>
Did I ever mention that I *hate* POV 3.6 radiosity?

Obviously it's the reference implementation POV 3.7 performance will be measured
against.

Less obviously, it's cheating like hell.

For instance, at higher radiosity recursion depths, it simply "files" the
radiosity samples under the wrong size in the octree, effectively "chopping"
its area of influence from spherical (with a nice smooth gradient inward) to
the octree node's cubic bounds (with a harsh "cutoff"). If we could see the
scene as it "looks" at such recursion depths, it would probably appear awfully
blocky and chunky.

The code suggests that this was probably not done deliberately: It may well have
been just another blunder, that just happens to speed things up at moderate
recursion depths, because octree lookups will produce a smaller fraction of
samples that turn out to be too far away and just waste time; at even higher
depths, however, it gets so extreme that octree lookup returns only a small
fraction of samples that would otherwise be re-used.

Either way here I am, brooding over POV 3.7 radiosity performance, and coming to
the conclusion that there's only one way to bring it back anywhere near what
people have become accustomed to with 3.6:

Cheat. Like hell.


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