[quake3] Elite Force Raytraced

[monk at rq3.com]

>> By the way: as far as I gathered, most of the raytracing stuff is CPU
>> based. Are there any plans to load tasks to the GPU?
> I actually tried that with a GeForce 7 in 2006 and gave a poster
> presentation at a raytracing conference. But the idea didn't turn out so
> well: With current GPU architectures there's simply too much performance
> wasted when communicating CPU<->GPU, especially read-backs are problematic
> (even with PCI-Express). A CPU-only implementation running on two cores
> outperformed the graphics card by a factor of 4-5. Using the GPU as an
> additional processing unit to the CPUs also yields a reduction in
> performance due to the associated overhead.
>
> It might be a viable approach with GeForce 8 and 9 cards, especially with
> APIs like nVidias CUDA.

I was wondering this myself.  With the "stream processor" parallelism in
the GF8/GF9 and the ATI 2xxx/3xxx/4xxx series of video cards, these are
beasts at some specific floating point operations like folding at home and
whatnot.