[Radiance-general] Re: Physically-based rendering using OpenGL?

[R Fritz]

> Even if the GPU were optimized for this problem, much of what goes on
> in Radiance is ray tree evaluation.  It all sort of happens together-- 
> you need to trace rays, figure out what to do at surfaces based on
> material properties, evaluate .cal files, share ambient data (reading
> and writing a shared cache) and all sorts of things that would have to
> be completely rethought for a GPU implementation.

Thanks, Greg. It sounds like a reimplementation of Radiance in some 
combination of GLSL and C, and that's a huge amount of work. On the 
other hand, it does sound possible, which is interesting. One more 
research project...

-- 
Randolph Fritz • RFritz at lbl.gov
Environmental Energy Technologies Division • Lawrence Berkeley Labs