> > In general POV-Ray compiles on 64bit systems but it won't be faster (in 
> > most cases even slower).  The main advantage would be to be able to 
> > address more than 4GB of memory.

> I couldn't believe this and did some testing with my own compilations of 
> POVRay.

  As noted in other articles of this thread, there's a slight confusion
of concepts here.

  64-bitness in itself does not bring any speed benefit to POV-Ray.
There's nothing special in having 64-bit pointers (and long integers,
which are not used almost anywhere in POV-Ray) which would bring
extra speed.
  However, making an AMD64-optimized binary can and most probably will
give speed benefits. However, this is not because AMD64 is a 64-bit
processor. It's because it has new features which the compiler can use
to make faster code and which the 32-bit processors don't have.

  In a 64-bit processor which has no extra speeding features compared
to its 32-bit equivalent (the UltraSparc being a good example of this)
you won't get any speed benefits from making a 64-bit binary.

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

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