Thorsten Froehlich <tho### [at] trfde> wrote:
> On 17.03.10 00:29, Michael wrote:
> > I'm trying to locate portions of POV-ray that bottleneck performance so that I
> > can try and offload some of POV-ray's workload onto a hardware accelerator.  I'm
> > just trying to see how fast I can get POV-ray to run by programming an FPGA to
> > accelerate certain portions of the code, but I'm finding it hard to locate in
> > the source.
>
> The bottlenecks for POV-Ray that best fit into hardware are the same as for
> any other ray-tracer: The bounding. It is uniform and simple (for hardware)
> and can easily be solved in parallel. You can find various SIGGRAPH papers
> (early to mid 2000s) on real-time ray-tracing that also covered or
> referenced hardware BSP algorithm implementations.
>
>  Thorsten, POV-Team

Hmm, ok, I figured it would be that or calculating intersections.  The thing I
need help on though is figuring out where to plug in my hardware into the
source.  So looking through the source, I'd take a guess that most of the
computation is done in render.cpp, but a lot of it seems boilerplate and I'm
having a difficult time trying to find where all of the computation is being
done.  If you could point me to certain functions, I'd appreciate it greatly.

Thanks!
Michael

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