>> What you're talking about amounts to a complete rewrite of the entire
>> program. Only the SDL parser would remain unchanged.
>
> No, the parser needs rewriting too, it's way too slow.

I'm not sure about "slow"; I think the way that macros are fundamentally 
based on token substitution rather than value manipulation places a hard 
limit on how fast the parser can be.

>> Plus, I'm pretty
>> sure all the trippy real-time GPU renderers we've seen only render
>> polygons, not true curved surfaces - which, let's face it, is the entire
>> *point* of using POV-Ray.
>
> Exactly, that's why we need POV4 asap - imagine the greatness!

I'm not sure if it's still the case, but it used to be that GPUs could 
render stuff so fast because triangle rendering is hard-wired into their 
design. Hence, if you were to make it render something that isn't 
triangles, it would be drastically slower.

Perhaps still faster than a CPU though. That would still be nice...

(Then again, I haven't tried the beta yet. I hear it uses multiple CPU 
cores now...)

Post a reply to this message