On Tue, 04 Aug 1998 21:16:11 -0300, Nick Bray
<bra### [at] biomedmedyaleedu> wrote:

>This is a question I had been thinking about recently. In the docs they say
>that getting povray to support multi-processors would be very difficult but
>shouldn't this be an easy task as far as NT is concerned? Correct me if I'm
>wrong(which is quite likely) but NT handles multiple processors by dividing
>the current threads between them. So if you created one thread to trace all
>even lines and one to trace all odd lines, the work should be pretty much
>divided between the two processors(of course, you can generalize this to
>more processors). This would be a relatively simple thing to program so I'm
>wondering where the trouble lies. Any help?

We need a FAQ.

Multithreading is hard to do because POV-Ray uses so many global
variables that you'd have to make thread-local.  If you can find all
of them, it would theoretically be easy, but you'd still have to
interlock access to the frame structure, which might cut performance
severely.

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