Render options for spherical camera.

[bigben]

Had a bit of free time to read the wiki while waiting for a largish spherical render to complete (still have half a day or so to go). Watching the render at the horizon and reading the page on ray tracing (http://www.planetside.co.uk/wiki/index.php?title=Ray_Trace_Objects_and_Defer_Atmosphere/Cloud#More_technical_details) I'm thinking that ray trace everything might be faster in this case(?) Has anyone done any testing with this? 
1. There are areas of atmosphere rendered below the horizon in the areas behind the camera (left and right quarters of the image). Defer atmosphere helps with that.
2. "... the ray tracer does not have the problem of overdraw that sometimes happens with the micro-polygon rasteriser"... lots of potential with a wide horizon
3. "... surfaces which are viewed at glancing angles, such as terrain or water near the horizon, tend to have micro-polygons that appear smaller than a pixel even thought they would appear much larger if they had been facing the camera."

Given that there is a lot of horizon in a spherical render and the progress of the render here is painfully slow it seems to fit the criteria for using ray trace everything. Does this sound right?

[jdent02]

Defer atmosphere is great to use when you don't have objects to raytrace and there's a lot of horizon in the image.

[Oshyan]

Your theory seems potentially sound, but for equivalent detail Raytrace Everything is quite a bit slower, so you'd have to have a *lot* of overdraw happening for it to be a net gain.

- Oshyan

[bigben]

Your theory seems potentially sound, but for equivalent detail Raytrace Everything is quite a bit slower, so you'd have to have a *lot* of overdraw happening for it to be a net gain.

- Oshyan

Thanks Oshyan. That certainly matches what I found out, I was testing against a render with detail=1