In article <3fa3a5db@news.povray.org> , "Ryan Bennitt" 
<rya### [at] lycoscouk> wrote:

> I was wondering if we would ever see raytracers written in
> vertex/pixel shader languges like these.

No, the programmable units on 3D graphic accelerators offer only 32 bit
precision floating-point numbers.  That is simply insufficient for
ray-tracing.  Besides, their pipelines are optimised for pixel processing
with local data, while ray-tracing requires very fast random memory access.

    Thorsten

____________________________________________________
Thorsten Froehlich, Duisburg, Germany
e-mail: tho### [at] trfde

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