Ray-tracing on mobile phones
Okay. Now I'm convinced.
We are living in the Matrix.
Arm is beefing up its role in the rapidly-evolving (yet long-standing) hardware-based real-time ray tracing arena. The company revealed on Tuesday that it will introduce the feature in its new flagship Immortalis-G715 GPU design for smartphones, promising to deliver graphics in mobile games that realistically recreate the way …
I remember playing with the first available version of PoVRay, might have still been called by it's full Sunday name of Persistence of Vision (or did it have an earlier name?). Text only interface to describe everything in the "world" and then waiting *DAYS* sometimes for the final result. Quite nice on an Amiga 1200 + FPU and accelerator with decent graphics. I even managed some short animations, each frame talking hours or more to render.
Now it's possible to do it in real-time on a piggin' phone FFS!!!
PoVRay is still current and still works in exactly the same way, script driven and is still FOSS with source code. There are GUI front-ends for it too. It evolved out of DKBTrace.
It's nice to see things which have not bloated beyond comprehension. Even when GUI based raytracers came along, I still liked PoVRay because it gave total control over exactly what I wanted to do, although having a GUI to make more complex 3D models was a great improvement and could be used in PoVRay.
I'll have to download the latest version and have a play now, dig out some of my old scripts. That's this weekend sorted!!