Raytracing on GPU?

[The Dubious Khelair]

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I was having a discussion with a friend the other day and he started
wondering whether or not doing complex scenes is possible utilizing GPU
processing technology to speed things up. We're both using povray (3.7b now),
but are open to new software provided the scene language isn't too horribly
different.
I guess I always assumed that utilizing the GPU would't be possible
for raytracing due to so many calculus equations going through; after a little
bit more thought, maybe all of the vector calculations that are accomplished
are what a GPU specializes in, though. It'd certainly be nice to speed up
scene rendinging by an order of magnitude or more. Things fly compared to how
they did before now that povray 3.7b utilizes multiple cores, but with complex
scenes, especially in high framerate animation, things can still far too
easily turn into days, weeks, and months.
If this isn't an option maybe it's time to look a little more into a
system that I think I remember hearing about awhile back that handles
raytracing scenes with a distributed computing architecture...
TIA for any information you may have available. Oh, my friend is not
against doing any custom software in order to get this working, either, so
alphas and betas are certainly welcome references.

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