That's a good idea, especially the idea of a whole benchmark suite, but
quite tricky on the other hand.  For example radiosity is still considered
as experimantal and differs between 3.1 and 3.5.  A benchmark would not be
complete without radiosity (since the intensive use of memory in a
radiosity scene is very important for performance) but you would not be
able to compare results from Povray 3.1 and 3.5.  Porting Povray 3.5 to
all platforms 3.1 currently runs on will take quite some time if it's
possible at all (since a C++ compiler is needed)

So what i would suggest is a general Povray 3.1 compatible benchmark scene
that's slower than skyvase and uses reasonable amount of memory.  

For an additional benchmark suite i would also use new features (and
radiosity) but only record results achieved with Povray 3.5 based compiles
since even if it's possible to render things with megapov results won't be
comparable.

Some conceptions for benchmark scenes i would suggest:

- reflection scene (low memory use, but slow because of highly complicated
reflections)
- complex csg scene (high memory use)
- radiosity scene (high memory use and very random access to memory)
- isosurface scene (testing performance in function evaluation)
- a large mesh scene (preferably macro generated, otherwise a large scene
file would be needed)
- a texture scene (basic geomentry but slow textures, would probably be
difficult to get this slow enough)

Christoph

-- 
Christoph Hormann <chr### [at] gmxde>
IsoWood include, radiosity tutorial, TransSkin and other 
things on: http://www.schunter.etc.tu-bs.de/~chris/

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