In the old thread of Improving the Speed of POV-Ray 3.02 on Win95 (which
started on June 15)  there was a small processor dicussion about speed and
POV-Ray.

Typical stuff of . . .
>Funny. I have a Pentium II 233, 64MB System. This is the part
>where I lecture you about the K6's FPU performance, but I won't. :)

Well being tired of this and having access to a few different computers so I
decided to run the speed test . . .

-i skyvase.pov
+v1
-d
+ft
-x
+a0.300
+r3
-q9
-w640
-h480
-mv2.0
-b1000

And these are my numbers, in order of best performance and all running
POV-Ray 3.02 for the respective operating systems.  You can adjust the
approximate system cost to your experience.

Alpha 21164A 533MHz 128Meg Ram
    Operating System:  RH Linux 4.2
    POV: Alpha Linux Command Line Version
    approximate system cost:  $3000
    time:  1 min 22 sec

Alpha 21164PC 533MHz 64Meg Ram
    Operating System:  WinNT 4.0
    POV:  AlphaNT Command Line Version (personal compile)
    approximate system cost:  $1900
    time:  1 min 23 sec

PII 333MHz 64Meg Ram
    Operating System:  Win95
    POV:  Standard Distribution
    approximate system cost:  $1800
    time:  2 min 3 sec

K6 266MHz 64Meg Ram
    Operating System:  Win95
    POV:  Standard Distribution
    approximate system cost:  $1200
    time:  2 min 58 sec

K6 200MHz 128Meg Ram
    Operating System:  RH Linux 4.2
    POV: x86 Linux Command Line Version
    approximate system cost:  $1000
    time:  3 min 9 sec

Pentium 200MHz MMX 64Meg Ram
    Operating System:  WinNT 4.0
    POV:  Standard Distribution
    approximate system cost:  $1000
    time:  4 min 1 sec

I get a few things from this.  One: the Alpha 21164PC really kicks ass.
Two: I'll never buy Intel for rendering, I'll buy Alpha.  And Three: If you
are really interested in rendering and time, use Linux and the commandline
version of POV-Ray.

Just my info.  Please add your times if you want (though sticking to version
3.02).

Mark Arrasmith
arr### [at] mathtwsuedu

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