Will POV-Ray render faster with a 3D card?

### 9.4.1 Will POV-Ray render faster with a 3D card?

"Will POV-Ray render faster if I buy the latest and fastest 3D videocard?"

No.

3D-cards are not designed for raytracing. They read polygon meshes and then scanline-render them. Scanline rendering has very little, if anything, to do with raytracing. 3D-cards can't calculate typical features of raytracing as reflections etc. The algorithms used in 3D-cards have nothing to do with raytracing.

This means that you can't use a 3D-card to speed up raytracing (even if you wanted to do so). Raytracing makes lots of float number calculations, and this is very FPU-consuming. You will get much more speed with a very fast FPU than a 3D-card.

What raytracing does is actually this: Calculate 1 pixel color and (optionally) put it on the screen. You will get little benefit from a fast videocard since only individual pixels are drawn on screen.