How to distinguish software rendering from hardware?

[Zoltan]

Is there a way to tell if the surface is being rendered by MentalRay
as opposed to computed on graphics hardware? I checked the
state variables but didn't find anything for this purpose.

[ruediger]

Hi Zoltan,

there is no way to determine this (which is the purpose of MetaSL that you don't need to think of whether the shader is run in HW or in SW). I can understand, that there might be some interest to figure out whether your shader is being rasterized or raytraced, but currently there is no machanism to detect this during runtime.

Best Regards,
Ruediger