[Radiance-dev] vectorization data types

[Lars Grobe]

> OK, I see what you mean, now.  I haven't profiled the code recently,  
> but relatively little time is spent in the matrix routines.   
> Optimizing a ray tracer is really challenging, because bottlenecks  
> are not easy to isolate.  A lot of time is spent in the various  
> material shading routines, which are spread all over the place and  
> not easy to simplify.  The only place where you can really focus  
> effort is in the actual octree traversal code, and this doesn't  
> vectorize at all.

I hoped at least for some transformations (instances, oconv), maybe even
color calculation. In fact, every code snippet where the same function is
applied to x,y,z (like fvect[0]=...; fvect[1]=...; fvect[2]=...;) should
win, as such calculations could apply to the whole vector at once, maybe
some color calculations as well.

In fact, the growth of a ray tree from a cluster of rays is something I
simply did not consider, as I am really not a programmer, so the idea of
tracing more than one ray at once (which was so pretty thinking about
ambient calculation) was nonsense.

But I will stop now and have a look at the code before I continue to write a
word ;-) Is there a nice schematic overview over the raytracing routines on
the net? I have my "RwR" left in Germany because it was a bit heavy to take
it in the plane ;-)))

CU Lars.