The PovBench (http://www.haveland.com/povbench/) has been obsolete for
long time now (several years, I would say). The skyvase scene is not slow
enough to measure current fastest computers accurately, and besides, the
list is full of bogus entries. Even if the entry is genuine, two entries
with a rendering time of 3 seconds just doesn't tell which one is better or
if they are equal.
  Moreover, using one simple scene to benchmark POV-Ray is too restrictive:
It measures just a very small percentage of POV-Ray features (eg. it doesn't
measure heavy memory usage or parsing speed).

  Wouldn't it be time to make a renewed POV-Ray benchmark? A much better
benchmark up to the current computer speeds?
  This benchmark could have the following features:

  1. It has more than one scene file, each one benchmarking its own important
area in rendering, for example one for raw raytracing speed, one which takes
long to parse, one which uses lots of memory, etc.

  2. These scene files should take a reasonable amount of time in current
computers. This amount should be chosen so that it will not be in the order
of a couple of seconds in a few years. For example they could take about 10
minutes each in an 1.2GHz Athlon.

  3. The submission of entries should be controlled. Of course it's difficult
to see if someone is just making a bogus entry if the numbers are credible,
but there could be, for example, a "trusted entry system": Entries from
trusted sources could get a mark showing that it's a trusted entry. Entries
not having this mark may or may not be true (and this should be clearly
stated in the page).

-- 
#macro N(D,I)#if(I<6)cylinder{M()#local D[I]=div(D[I],104);M().5,2pigment{
rgb M()}}N(D,(D[I]>99?I:I+1))#end#end#macro M()<mod(D[I],13)-6,mod(div(D[I
],13),8)-3,10>#end blob{N(array[6]{11117333955,
7382340,3358,3900569407,970,4254934330},0)}//                     - Warp -

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