# Introduction

Tachyon is designed to be a very fast renderer, based on ray tracing, and employing parallel processing to achieve high performance.

At the present time, Tachyon and its scene description language are fairly primitive, this will be remedied as time passes. For now I'm going to skip the “intro to ray tracing” and related things that should probably go here, they are better addressed by the numerous books on the subject written by others. This document is designed to serve the needs of sophisticated users that are already experienced with ray tracing and basic graphics concepts, rather than catering to beginners. If you have suggestions for improving this manual, I'll be glad to address them as time permits.

Until this document is finished and all-inclusive, the best way to learn how Tachyon works is to examine some of the sample scenes that I've included in the Tachyon distribution. Although they are all very simple, each of the scenes tries to show something slightly different Tachyon can do. Since Tachyon is rapidly changing to accommodate new rendering primitives and speed optimizations, the scene description language is likely to change to some degree as well.

Subsections

- Tachyon Feature List