11 ms·

I think parent was wondering what the word "accelated" in "software-accelerated" could mean. Faster than what? (faster doing the calculations by hand? :)

• dragontamer 5y ago
  The concept of "accelerating" raytracing operations on a CPU makes almost no sense. GPUs require acceleration because the memory latency on GPUs is pretty large, caches are small, and GPUs have such huge compute that waiting around for the "next = bvh-tree->left" operation takes a huge amount of time. By making dedicated acceleration structures and hardware, that latency can be mitigated, and the huge compute capabilities of GPUs can be unleashed. ---------- In contrast, CPUs are already really good (relatively) at pointer-dereferencing loops. CPUs have less compute and more memory-optimizations (relative to a GPU anyway).