#Sparks
Have noticed the "any render time >0 needs acceleration" before. This is a
rather impossible goal. If you said however, "any render time > effective
frame rate needs acceleration" you might eventually get your wish.
Real time rendering/ray tracing video resolution images in real time (1/60 sec
to calculate 4.2 MHz video screen) is doable today with alternative archetecure
processers (i.e. wierd supercomputer that is hard to program, but kicks butt on
vectorized ray trace calculations). The hardware for such a machine could even
be rather inexpensive (like < 50K) in low production quantities. The problem
is amortizing the design cost of such a beast if you wern't going to sell as
many as something like a Pentium.
Anyway, now that you're all excited, sit back down, because even 'tho it's
possible today, you probably won't see anything neat for 5 to 10 years, as the
market gradually gets big enough to become 'interesting' to those with enough
$$ (and know how) to make such things.
In the short term remember you've already got the power of a couple of early
Cray's lying around. Now if only you could get your hands on some of the
processing power they have online at the NSA……