And then the invented the “Pure” card. I don’t think I’ve ever full-out lusted for a piece of computer hardware before. I feel dirty and greedy and consumerist… but it computes 1.1 BILLION ray intersections a second, and it fits inside your computer.

Let’s do a little math.

If I’m rendering a movie at 640 by 480 pixels for television, say, and all of my polygons were non-reflective and didn’t cast shadows and weren’t antialiased, that’s 307,200 ray intersections to compute.

That means I can render 3580 frames per second.

I feel a funny tingle all over.

Just for fun, -with- all those special enhancements, a ridiculously convoluted scene with five mirrors all facing eachother and always reflecting five times, with each reflection subsequently antialiased, could be rendered at 28 frames per second, or faster than cinema real-time.

Update: They got back to me with a price. I can have the Pure Card for the low low price of $4500 CDN. It’s probably worth it, really… (I *know* it’s worth it) but that’s about 3 times what I paid for my computer,
and 10 times it’s current value.