> A GPU implementation of instant radiosity presented at this year's 
> SIGRAPH.  Yeah, objects move around and affect GI.  be very afraid...

Yes I think dynamic GI is getting more and more realistic on the GPU, it 
makes a huge visual difference that is often hard to pin down (ie it just 
"looks better" but it's not massively obvious like adding reflections).

> Of course, that's only in the triangle mesh-world, not in the world of 
> perfect sphere surfaces...

I don't understand the fascination with perfect mathematically described 
surfaces, they are inflexible and slow to render.  If you use sub-divided 
triangle meshes you can make the output perfectly smooth all the time and of 
course do whatever transformations you like very easily by just transforming 
every vertex.  AFAIK all film-quality 3D animation is done with triangle 
mesh based renderers, and we can probably assume they have worked out the 
best way to get photo-realistic quality.  And the huge benefit for games 
(rather than offline rendering) is that it's very simple to reduce the 
triangle count to keep real-time animation.

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