Zeger Knaepen <zeg### [at] povplacecom> wrote:
> I'm not sure about that, I don't think so, but that again is easily tested: 
> a relatively slow rendering scene rendered identically a couple of times 
> should, if you're right, always have the exact same render-time.

  Not really. There are other things which can affect POV-Ray's rendering
speed than CPU load, and other programs can, in theory, affect this rendering
time, even if indirectly. There can be all kinds of caching and memory paging
issues, for example (in other words, a different process might cause the
POV-Ray process to suffer from more cache misses and increased memory paging
if this another process is also using the cache heavily).

  The ultimate experiment to see which way POV-Ray counts the time is to
simply have a very CPU-intensive program running at the same time as POV-Ray
(so that both will get about 50% of CPU-time): If the rendering time reported
by POV-Ray approximately doubles, then it indeed takes this time from the
system clock (iow. it uses the so-called wallclock time).

  I might have simply remembered wrongly this subject.

> trying it now!

  It seems that inside_vector definitely has some impact on the rendering
speed of meshes (although I'm not exactly sure of why), which is probably
one reason why it's not turned on by default (the other one being backwards
compatibility).

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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