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This short tutorial gives an overview of ray-tracing methods.
Ray tracing is a technique for rendering three-dimensional graphics with complex light interactions. Everything we see is visible because light reflects from objects in a scene. Ray tracing attempts to simulate the path that beams of light take as they interact with these objects. Though modern video cards can also simulate many of the lighting and shadow effects that a ray tracing engine can produce, they use different methods to fool the eye and may or may not be as realistic as a ray traced scene.
Though POVRay can run on a '486 or even a '386, doing even semi-serious renderings is best done on at least a PII/350 or K6-2/450. As a baseline comparison, the animations on this page took anywhere from 4 to 8 hours on an Athlon 900 with 512M RAM. Graphics hardware is somewhat irrelevant for creating images in POVRay. Blender works best with an OpenGL accelerated video card because it speeds the preview, though the rendering engine itself is independent of the preview.
Visual Molecular Dynamics Molecule generated in VMD
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