>> I think the main thing that makes POV-Ray look so damned good is that it
>> doesn't use polygon meshes (it uses real curved geometry), and it
>> doesn't use bitmap textures (it uses procedural texturing), and it
>> doesn't fake the lighting equation quite as poorly as most game engines.
>> (Although it's no unbiased renderer.)
>
> I thought GPUs did some real curved geometry on simple primitives like
> spheres or cubes.

I haven't seen it personally, but it ought to be possible.

> not unbiased? how so?

20 years ago, ray tracing was a big deal. Today, it seems that "unbiased 
rendering" is the next big thing. It's where you basically simulate 
*all* light paths, all at once. So no need for separate photon maps, 
radiosity tuning, etc. It's all automatic.

And slot as hell, by the way.

> I thought POV-Ray accuracy came from accurate 64-bit floats raytracing.

Numerical precision has little if anything to do with it. The accuracy 
comes from using more life-like equations, rather than the heavily 
simplified ones that go into most games to make them fast enough for 
real-time.

>> More likely, you could move "most" of the work to the GPU; things
>> like parsing the scene data and so forth will always be on the CPU.
>>
>> I gather that procedural texturing is quite possible on a GPU. (But
>> nobody uses it, for whatever reason.) Ray tracing is certainly possible.
>> Realistic real-time lighting is possible. The big thing that I haven't
>> seen done is non-polygon geometry. I don't know if it's currently
>> feasible to do that on a GPU. I don't see why not...
>
> Well I wouldn't know about much GPUs and their use, but if what you say
> is true I think GPUs now are powerful enough to start using more
> raytracing features to render, but I find it harder to calculate and
> render, more transistors more & power consumption, and calculating when
> an object gets hit but another or how it gets destroyed (for games) I
> think would be another task to overcome, because rounded triangle meshes
> I think are easier to manipulate and to fracture. But I am all for
> seeing a GPU version of POV-Ray solving these problems in an efficient
> way and giving us 24 fps.

We'll see what developers come up with, I guess...

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