"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...

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