Comment by defrost | Hacker News Reader

Comment by defrost | Hacker News Reader

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By their FAQ: CPU, FPU, Bus speed, and Memory bound - in decreasing order of relevance.

Will POV-Ray render faster if I buy the latest and fastest 3D videocard?

    3D-cards are not designed for raytracing. They read polygon meshes and then scanline-render them. Scanline rendering has very little, if anything, to do with raytracing. 3D-cards can't calculate typical features of raytracing as reflections etc. The algorithms used in 3D-cards have nothing to do with raytracing.

Does POV-Ray support 3DNow for faster rendering?

    No, and most likely never will.

https://wiki.povray.org/content/Knowledgebase:Miscellaneous

    POV-Ray 3.7.0 (released 6 November 2013) is the current official version for all platforms.

    There are significant internal changes in this version due to the introduction of SMP support.

https://www.povray.org/download/

> 3D-cards are not designed for raytracing.

That's a rather old statement. Nvidia and Apple GPUs have hardware-accelerated raytracing now. But even without specific raytracing features, lots of renderers use GPU compute for some of the raytracing workflow.

It dates back to 2013.

I've merely quoted what the POX-Ray site has to say about it's own capabilities and beliefs at the time of writing.

It's older than that. I remember that from ~2002, when I used POV-Ray for a class project.

POV-Ray itself dates back to the early 90s (and was based on code from the 80s). The FAQ in question was last updated 2013, and the paragraph about graphics cards is probably older than that.

Things have changed a bit since that was written. Of course nowadays Graphics cards do permit somewhat arbitrary code to run, and can also be used by a ray tracing engine. Of course said engine has to be written to utilize them.

For instance, the Cycles [1] engine in Blender.

If you're into ray tracing as a hobby you have to play with it at least once! Cycles does probabilistic rendering and can handle tricky things like caustics.

[1] https://www.cycles-renderer.org/

[2] https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/render/cycles/gpu_...

(edit) : TIL there's also Luxcorerender, which is also an engine that can render using GPU. https://luxcorerender.org/heterogeneous-computing/

Cycles is not the only one, about half of mainstream commercial 3D renderers are using the GPU for rendering now. Possibly more than that.

Are you telling me my 3dfx Voodoo card is useless?

Still in production... I guess :) https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=100871

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