Warp wrote:
> _theCardinal <_the### [at] yahoocom> wrote:
>>  A: CUDA supports the C "double" data type.  However on G80
>>     (e.g. GeForce 8800) GPUs, these types will get demoted to 32-bit
>>     floats.  NVIDIA GPUs supporting double precision in hardware will
>>     become available in late 2007."
> 
>   And my questiom is: When it supports 64-bit floating point numbers,
> how will it be different from current FPUs?

The most important difference probably is that the GPUs are closed 
products with no comprehensive specifications being available.  If you 
like to use them you have to use the proprietary SDKs provided by Nvidia 
and available only for the platforms they support (if you are lucky they 
offer a x86-linux version - usually working only in combination with 
their closed hardware drivers, if not it's Windows only).

I would strongly suggest anyone who is thinking about integrating 
something like that with POV-Ray to think twice about putting much work 
into a technology that is almost certainly outdated and forgotten within 
2-3 years.

Christoph

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