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From what I understand the average GPU is optimized for meshes which is not the povray way so GPUs tend not to offer much improvement. Quick search for a more informed explanation.

  The main problem here is that POV-Ray is primitive based, NOT mesh based.
  GPU rendering is heavily mesh optimized. They can process in parallel, 
  but only if all threads need to use the same base code. With POV-Ray,  
  there is no universal geometry handling code : Each and every primitive 
  require different code and GPU just can't cope with that requirement.

https://news.povray.org/povray.general/thread/%3C6115a40a$1@...

1 comments

I understand POV-Ray is optimised using SSE or AVX instructions. You can do arithmetic operations on vectors in GPUs in a much more efficient way. That's why crypto and AI are using GPUs. If you can divide your work in simple arithmetic parallel operations, the GPU will be happy to do it on a massive scale. You have things like CUDA to use but even a simple thing like a compute shader will help.

For a modern GPU a mesh is an abstraction. You can think of it like a collection of very basic CPU cores which only know do do a few basic operation on a massive collection of data. This is an over simplification but an useful mental model.

If I understand you correctly you are just elaborating on the bit I excerpted from the linked thread? This is out of my depth but it is interesting. It seems povray would have to drastically change how it works to really benefit from GPUs since in povray a sphere is an object related to pi and not a series of triangles which are arranged into the shape of a sphere where each triangle can be easily paralleled on a GPU since they are all handled the same way?

Or did I not understand and you are saying povray's performance could actually be improved by modern GPUs without reworking how it deals with its primatives?