>> I believe the 200 series is supposed to be the first release to support
>> CUDA.
>
> I don't think so.  It also works on older ones, but without many cores, the
> speed improvements are kinda negligible.

According to Wikipedia, CUDA is supported from the GeForce 8000 onwards. 
So yes, my 260 should support it. (I've got the older 192-core version, 
rather than the improved 216-core one.)

I doubt any number of cores would be small enough for the speed increase 
to be "negligible"; a GPU core is much simpler than a CPU core, so it 
does a hell of a lot more work per clock cycle. However, Wikipedia does 
say something about the amount of video RAM being an issue with older 
cards...

>> Isn't it in the main build yet?
>
> I'm not actually sure, have not followed up latest developments.  But it's still
> beta software that was announced about august last year.

OK.

>>> Here's a nice test scene:
>>
>> Nice scene is nice. But I shudder to think how many decades it would
>> take on a twenty-PC render cluster...
>
> A few hours on your average PC.

Heh. I doubt it. ;-)

> Notice though that unbiased rendering
> supposedly never halts:  it improves the image gradually, removing noise as it
> goes.

Sure. I meant "how many billion hours do you have to run it before it 
stops looking horribly noisy?"

>>> No povray wood is good enough on close-ups, it simply lacks the grain.  Even
>>> with noise or combining with other texture...
>>
>> This is not my experience.
>
> I see grain in the wood of my tabletop that I never saw in povray wood, even
> good ones like the one in Warp's tips on realism... the difficult here is that
> the grain follows the direction the pattern flows...

Well, all I can say is it looked pretty convincing to me.

> If you from far away, you only notice the typical wood pattern, but close
> enough, you miss this thing.  And if you only intend to look from far away, no
> problem with "blurriness" for bitmaps.

I have yet to see any game with bitmap textures of high enough 
resolution that you can't clearly see the pixels, even with all the 
anisotropic filtering. :-P

> BTW, this is something that is visible in marble too:  looking close, you see
> there's lots of tiny crystal facets shining through just bellow the surface and
> you can't fake that with a mere texture.

Not if you don't design it into the texture, no. But if you do design it 
in... yes! ;-)

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