In article <3ee5a9ca@news.povray.org>,
 sascha <sas### [at] userssourceforgenet> wrote:

> I agree with you that raytracing would be the winner if there were *a 
> lot* of primitives which appear smaller than a single pixel so that 
> their bounding-boxes will never get hit by a ray - but usually both, 
> REYES and game-engines use some sort of level-of-detail optimizations to 
> prevent this scenario...

The shapes don't need to appear smaller than a pixel, they just need to 
have another shape be hit in front of their bounds so the bounded shape 
isn't tested. If you have a lot of shapes partially or totally obscured 
by other shapes, raytracing gets better by testing fewer shapes while 
scanlining stays about the same, having to draw the same number of 
triangles and shade the same number of pixels.

-- 
Christopher James Huff <cja### [at] earthlinknet>
http://home.earthlink.net/~cjameshuff/
POV-Ray TAG: chr### [at] tagpovrayorg
http://tag.povray.org/

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