Hmm, both language's cater for 64-bit floating point precision. I guess with
current hardware, their compilers will truncate any use of 64-bit to 32-bit
floats though. If shaders become more considerably complex in the gaming
industry (as is predicted), then the hardware will follow suit, and there may
well be demand for full 64-bit precision. Maybe today's hardware isn't up to it,
but in the future this might be more viable. As far as I can tell though,
there's nothing in the language specifications that rules out the development of
a ray tracer.

Ryan

"Thorsten Froehlich" <tho### [at] trfde> wrote in message
news:3fa58386$1@news.povray.org...
> In article <3fa3a5db@news.povray.org> , "Ryan Bennitt"
> <rya### [at] lycoscouk> wrote:
>
> > I was wondering if we would ever see raytracers written in
> > vertex/pixel shader languges like these.
>
> No, the programmable units on 3D graphic accelerators offer only 32 bit
> precision floating-point numbers.  That is simply insufficient for
> ray-tracing.  Besides, their pipelines are optimised for pixel processing
> with local data, while ray-tracing requires very fast random memory access.
>
>     Thorsten
>
> ____________________________________________________
> Thorsten Froehlich, Duisburg, Germany
> e-mail: tho### [at] trfde
>
> Visit POV-Ray on the web: http://mac.povray.org

Post a reply to this message