Great conversation, all interesting thoughts, but here's another idea:
How about an iterative/recursive benchmark?  Write a small external utility
to call POV with custom scenes.  If POV returns too fast (say, under 5
minutes) then it creates a slightly more complex scene and tries it again.
It could even spit out different types of scenes (one where a number of
spheres are randomly distributed in a space, or a reflective-sphere floating
over a checkered plane with an area light that keeps getting more and more
lights in it, or one that gets more and more levels of textures, or inside a
reflective box and keep bumping up the max_recursion level).  For really
slow processors, it would stop reasonably soon and say "OK, that's the limit
of your processor", or, for really fast processors, it might have to keep
bumping things up.  The benchmark, then, would not be render time but scene
complexity.
Any thoughts?

...Chambers

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