Chris Cason wrote:

> If you folks would like to summarise what you consider to be the most
> important outstanding issues, I'll see which of those I can tackle in the
> time I have.

Did anyone try to reproduce the effect that 3.7 seems to be
significantly slower (read: more than any reasonable overhead)
on some single core systems (in my case: P4 2.6 WinXP)? This is
of course not urgent for beta26, but if the final version has
the same behavior, it will seriously deter some people from
using the new version. I realize the real benefit of 3.7 is
for multi-core systems, but it suppose it is also in your
interest that all users work with the newest version.

For examples, rendering the sample advanced/abyss.pov with
640x480 AA 0.3 took about 3 minutes with 3.6 on my system,
but 9 minutes with 3.7 in the SSE2 version using thread
count 1.

Yes, I realize this image requires a different aspect ratio,
noted this too late, but shouldn't be relevant here ;)

I was a bit surprised by this result myself; last time I
used a simpler test scene and only had a slowdown of 1.5.
I even downloaded beta25 to verify it, but the results were
similar to beta24 (actually, beta24 took about 10 minutes).

And BTW, having to set the thread count to 1 manually
after each startup is really annoying (although a thread
count of 2 doesn't cause much overhead when the render is
slow anyway, but for quick test renders which should be
done in a few seconds this can cause a factor of 2).

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