Warp wrote:

>   Don't know about Cell, but in CUDA it's probably just impossible. For one,
> CUDA doesn't support recursive function calls, which is more or less a must
> in raytracing. (POV-Ray uses recursion not only for tracing rays but other
> things as well.) Also single-precision floating point (with division and
> square root of even lower quality compared to single-precision math done
> with the FPU) is also a rather big wall. Not to talk about the CPU/GPU
> bottleneck. As for multithreading, threads must run in groups of at least
> 32 threads that execute identical instructions simultaneously. Not very
> likely in raytracing (again, because of all those pesky random recursions...)

It can be done.

It's not what you'd call "easy". Would require an absurd amount of work 
to do it.

(You can build a ray queue. The GPU picks up a bundle of rays, sees 
whether or not each one intesects object X, and stores that somewhere. 
You then move the rays that hit it into another render queue ready to go 
through a different pass of the process. Long, complicated, and quite 
possibly not actually very fast...)

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