David Wallace wrote:

> You are talking about the vertex shader part of a graphics card and its 
> limited applicability to surfaces generated mathematically via POV-Ray. 
>  I am more interested in the pixel shader and offloading the texture 
> evaluation, especially the built-in patterns, to the graphics card. That 
> should be much easier.

With Cuda you no longer need to think in terms of vertex shader
or pixel shader. You still need to think in the terms of computing
architecture, i.e., massive parallelization with extremely limited
local memory and highly expensive access to global data structures.
Also, an individual calculation must be expensive enough to warrant
the overhead of delegating its execution to the GPU.

That being said, if someone is looking for a pet Cuda project,
I think media would be a hot candidate to benefit from the GPU
(without radiosity & photon interaction, though). It would be
possible to parallelize over the sample count, and relevant
data should fit within the 16KB of a processor cluster
(mainly light sources and density functions?).

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