Fnord.

Way back in 98 or so, Chris Woody and I built a 8-CPU Linux cluster using NFS, Povray and homebuilt task partitioning code in C. Ahh, good times - thinnet & hand-installs on freaky flaky hardware. 

Overall, we got about half the performance of a Pentium-II, which was decent, mostly due to the efficiency with which Povray can slice up a rendering job. You can see more details on the project page.

I bring this up because today I see the newest nVidia hardware/software that does raytracing a la Povray… in real time, at 30 frames per second, at 1920×1200:

Yowza. The times, they are amazing.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 15th, 2008 at 10:01 am and is filed under Geek stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.