> Damn, your graphics card is *drastically* faster than mine... (When I
> pan the image, it comes out yellow for the first half a dozen frames.)

That's because you had to reduce the samples per frame down. That 
variable controls how many samples the GPU averages over for each 
redraw. When you're rotating the scene it continuously redraws from 
scratch so if you've got samples set to 1 it's going to look *very* 
noisy. 40 is about the max I can do (at 1024x512 resolution) and still 
spin around at what looks like 60 fps. Any higher and it starts to 
stutter (even just dragging around other windows start to stutter too!).

Of course once you stop dragging it starts to remember the previous 
frames and average them out.

> I wonder... how long will it be before games look like this in realtime?
> (I'm guessing a while, since this scene contains a piffling half a dozen
> bits of trivial geometry.)

Bear in mind my implementation is about as unoptimised as you could ever 
get, it's just relying on brute force rather than anything clever at 
all. For something far more optimised look at this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKqxonOrl4Q
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpT6MkCeP7Y

I'm sure if nVidia designed a path tracing specific GPU today it would 
be plenty fast enough, the trouble is you're trying to shoe-horn some 
algorithm into a chip that was designed for something completely different.

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