I've noticed a similar slowdown when rendering animations without an ini 
file, though it wasn't as severe as that, it only got slower by a small 
percentage each frame. In my case it seems to be something to do with pov's 
message window. I found a trick that if I press Alt once (in the windows 
version of pov) povray stops updating the message window and animations 
render faster, though this only has a big effect on animations with very 
short render times, like 5 seconds per frame. I dunno if that's the cause of 
the problems or just a similar aspect, but I've definitely had animations 
that render slower after 100 frames than if I start them on the 100th frame.

It's worth mentioning I haven't noticed this with the latest versions of 
povray  (though it's still faster with the Alt trick), but I haven't been 
rendering many animations. Back when I originally noticed the problem I 
satisfied myself it was also affecting still images, i.e. the bottom of an 
image would render slower than the top. But in my experience it's only a 
small percentage slower so I never got to the bottom of the mystery.

-- 
Tek
http://evilsuperbrain.com

"i_need_a_unique_name" <nomail@nomail> wrote in message 
news:web.45827829b0256beac77a5930@news.povray.org...
> Rendering an animation (obviously)
>
> An individual frame takes about 5 minutes.
>
> When rendering via an ini file though each frame takes longer and longer
> until within 4 or 5 frames the whole render process has ground to a
> complete halt.
>
> frame 0 : 5 minutes
> frame 1 : 10 minutes
>
> If I start the animation using +SF1 then frame 1 takes 5 minutes
>
> Is this a known issue with Povray?
>
> Further info using scattering media, with a couple of spotlights, shed 
> loads
> of reflective surfaces, photons turned on with media interaction.
>
> Machine Dell XPS Core 2 Duo 2.16GHz 3.25G ram : whilst render is running
> Sysinfo is indicating 2.4G physical ram is free ie not hitting swap file.
>
> Regards
> Rob
>
>

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