Christopher James Huff wrote:
> 
> "Greg M. Johnson" <gregj:-)56590@ao:-)l.com> wrote in message
> news:3dc41962$1@news.povray.org...
> > Remco made me aware of this astonishing  fact in p.b.a.  Here is a scene
> > file that makes it obvious.
> >
> > A compact stack of 250 cylinders renders in 73 seconds.
> > A compact stack of 250 spheres renders in 6 seconds.
> 
> Why is this astonishing? What did you expect?
> Not only are cylinders harder to solve for, using more complex math, but
> bounding is much less effective. An unscaled sphere always fills the
> majority of its bounding box, a cylinder can fill a very small percentage.
> And I think the blob components are sphere bounded, which would make
> cylinders even less efficient. Of course they are slower...

I think it would be astonishing to presume that the average user would
know the internal workings of POV-Ray enough to come to the same
conclusion :)

-- 
Ken Tyler

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