Warp wrote:
>   So it's a question of deciding which is worse, additional memory usage
> or perhaps a bit slower rendering.
>   (And take into account that the transformation matrix itself takes
> some meory, so unless the CSG is very big, it could take even more memory
> than without one.)

Thanks for the answer.

I was thinking primarily of their usefulness with large CSGs (in 
particular in natural scenes with lots of trees, blades of grass, etc). 
  I would also imagine that it would not (in a redesign, not necessarily 
in the current povray) be possible to detect if an object is #declared 
and instanced multiple times and to make an estimation about weather it 
would be better use reference counting or not.  Worst case there could 
be a flag that could be set within the scene file.

At any rate, I'm glad to hear that these issues are likely to be 
considered in the pov4 redesign.  The developers seem to be pretty 
fantastic, so I'll trust that they'll do a good job on this issue as 
well.  For now I'll just content myself with meshes or more RAM.

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