Invisible wrote:
> Au contrare... Ever heard of displacement mapping? This is nothing other
> than running a (simplistic) ray tracer as a pixel shader. Physically
> correct dynamic reflections are already possible via ray tracing
> (although you're still tracing stupid flat polygons rather than true
> geometry). There have been tech demos of full ray tracers running on
> standard GPU hardware.

Yes, as I have mentioned, I have seen them too, impressive, but not yet 
in a commercial way and I doubt with 100% POV-Ray features & 
capabilities. Never hear of displacement mapping. As you mention *some* 
raytracing is possible on *some* experimental GPUs; what I meant was a 
100% GPU implementation of POV-Ray giving at least 24fps at, lets say, 
1360x768 resolution.

> Thing is, ray tracing sometimes doesn't automatically make it look cool.
> If your model is a low-polygon mesh using low-resolution bitmap
> textures, it'll look crappy no matter what rendering technology you use.
> Even if you import a game map into POV-Ray, it'll still look lame,
> despite the superior rendering.

True, I have been seen improved models/textures in a open source game 
project (source code made open source by owners): www.hard-light.net, 
and the original models/textures needed some work to make it look sort 
of today standards.

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