Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote:
> Louis <nomail@nomail> wrote:
> > It probably would not be possible to let every core process a pixel
>
>   How do you suggest for the GPU to process the scene data (which it needs
> to trace rays in the first place), which might take hundreds of megabytes of
> memory?
>
>   And does CUDA already support conditional recursion?
>
> --
>                                                           - Warp

#1: GPU has a bank of global memory which is fully accessable to every core.
Sizes in new cards vary, though the very bottom of the range is probably 128MB
(top of the range is 4GB, general consumer stuff is 256-768MB). Newer GPUs also
have the ability to directly access host RAM.

#2: No, but next gen (Q1 2010) will. IIRC this was annouced in October. Speed
would depend on quite how branchy it is.


People are doing raytracing on CUDA already (are I think they're quite speedy -
look up NVIDIA's Optix), though I imagine they can't quite match the feature set
of pov-ray... and it's probably these features that don't map to GPUs. I must
admit to being fairly ignorant when it comes to interals of ray-tracers.

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