A collection of small furry animals catches our attention, pointing their paws at this very interesting research paper. Have a look, says one.
It's a project rather unpromisingly entitled "Ray Tracing on Programmable Graphics Hardware" and it's emerged from Stanford's Graphics Lab, with more than a little help from NVidia.
The paper explains "how viewing a programmable graphics processor as a general parallel computation device can help us leverage the graphics processor performance curve and apply it to more general parallel computations, specifically ray tracing.
Obviously hoping no one is awake, they elaborate:-
"We have shown that ray casting can be done efficiently in graphics hardware. We hope to encourage graphics hardware to evolve toward a more general programmable stream architecture."
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