"Warp" <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote in message
news:3b810636@news.povray.org...
>   The idea behind this is that some computers are better in one of those
than
> in another, and this kind of test gives a good idea where is that computer
> good at.
>   One single scene can't test all of those things, and even if it does
> (as in the 4th example), one can't see how well the computer performs in
> the individual tasks.

Personally, I like that part.

>
> : That's way too short.
> : It should take at least two hours on the 1.4GHz Athlon with enough
memory.
>
>   I think two hours is a bit overkill. Granted, 10 minutes may be too
short,
> but I think 2 hours is too much. I don't think people want to wait for
hours
> for this.
>   Or perhaps if 4 pov-files are used, the total time could be about 2
hours,
> which would mean a half-hour per file.

Two hours for a benchmark seems a little excessive for me (especially on a
1.4gHz Athlon, which will make my 850mHz Duron seem like a slug...), but it
would make the benchmark last longer.  The problem with that, though, is
that in future years POV-Ray may well acquire new features / optimizations
which would mean we would need new test scenes.  We might have to rewrite
the test scenes before we even get to the 10 minute stage...

> : Really, faked entries are of no concern for commonly available systems:
> : When a lot of P2/400 MHz gives a render time of x, the x/30 entry is
> : obviously faked.
>
>   Of course, but I suppose that many people have the temptation to take
away
> a small but unnoticeable amount from the real rendering times (eg. if the
> real rendering time was 35 minutes, they could just report 31 minutes and
> no-one will notice). Unfortunately many people are like this; even if they
> don't get anything from that (not even their name anywhere), they still
tend
> to "exaggerate" a bit to look better.

I had never even thought of faking an entry.  It's a sad, sad world...
Seriously, if that's a problem, then write a small utility program that will
call POV with the appropriate options, grab the output and FTP / email the
results somewhere they can be accepted.  Unless the user wants to hack the
utility, no problem (I don't see why anyone would hack this, as it isn't
very interesting for people outside of this group, but then, I'm not most
people...)

...Chambers

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