## Tachyon Feature List

Although Tachyon is a very small program, it is relatively complete and even has a few features often associated with much larger and more sophisticated ray tracing packages:

- Parallel execution using MPI, POSIX threads, Unix-International threads, or Microsoft Windows threading APIs
- Run-time display and interactive ray tracing (on sufficiently fast systems) with built-in support for Spaceball and SpaceNavigator 6DOF motion controllers for fly-through navigation
- Ambient occlusion lighting
- Support for 48-bit deep color image formats
- Supersampled antialiasing
- Linear, exponential, and exponential-squared fog
- Perspective, orthographic, and depth-of-field camera projection modes, with eye-space frustum controls
- Positional, directional, and spot lights, with optional attenuation.
- Provides commonly used geometric objects including Spheres, Planes, Triangles, Cylinders, Quadrics, and Rings
- Texture mapping (both texture images, and volumetric textures), with automatic MIP-map generation.
- Direct rendering of volumetric data
- Support for angle-modulated transparency, limited-ray-depth transparency, edge cueing with outline shading, and other special shading modes useful for molecular visualization
- Grid-based spatial decomposition for effecient rendering of both static and time-varying geometry