This is a typical 'Spheres on checkerboard floor' Raytracing Scene, just like the ones created with the first raytracers available for the PC (or the Amiga, of course) like DBW, QRT or DKB (which is now POV-Ray). It shows most of the typical features like true reflection and refraction in glass and mirrors, texture mapping, specular highlights and precise shadows, that haven't been available in earlier rendering algorithms like the depth-buffer-algorithm or the depth-sort-(painter-)algorithm (Do you remember Allen Hasting's 'VideoScape', a predecessor of 'Lightwave'?).

It can be clearly seen, that, because the WinOSi-Algorithm is based on the raytracing method, all those nice effects can be rendered with WinOSi too.

In addition there are several effects visible in the WinOSi-rendering, which can't be produced by a standard raytracer, like true caustics, specular and diffuse indirect illumination, area-lights with soft shadows and highlights that are real reflections of the light-sources instead of generating them locally by a phong-shader.

Although those features are not part of the standard raytracing model, today's state-of-the-art raytracers (like POV-Ray for example) have extended the standard to emulate area lights, caustics (often not very accurate), and global illumination (only approximated) together with advanced shading algorithms like the Cook-and-Torrance shader.

But: Raytracing an image with large area lights, perfect anti-aliasing, global illumination, caustics, color dispersion etc. dramatically slows down even the quickest raytracer because of the huge additional computation.

In WinOSi all these effects are part of the basic rendering model and so the rendering speed is nearly the same if you have a single point light or many large area lights, if you use perfect anti-aliasing or none. Actually you even can't switch off caustic- or shadow-generation in WinOSi because they are an integral part of the whole algorithm.

The above image was rendered in over 200 hours with a resolution enhanced release 0.3 by Daniel Renner from www.3d-gfx.com