TC schrieb:
> 
> I wonder how large a povray rendered image can be?
> 
> While 1280x1024 fits on an A4-page nicely at 150 dpi, what about renders at 
> higher resolutions? What are the limits?

Sky's the limit!

Ah well, main memory actually is.

I did a 20,000x10,000 pixels render recently. On my 6-GB 64-bit XP 
machine POV-Ray went unstable, but my 6-GB 64-bit Linux machine did the job.

Note that the output buffer needs 4 bytes per pixel and color channel 
(invariably buffering the data in 32-bit floating point format before 
converting to whatever the output file format holds), for a total of 12 
or 16 bytes per pixel (can't tell off the top of my head whether space 
for an alpha channel is always reserved or not), so the aforementioned 
resolution needs some 2 GB of output buffer alone.

> What is the largest image you have rendered and how long did it take?

Rendering times are too strongly influenced by the scene to make any 
absolute statement here that would help you.

The 20,000x10,000 render, for instance, did take no more than 7 minutes; 
but it was only a montage step to merge two other renders - something 
that would take just a few seconds at "sane" resolutions.

As a rule-of-thumb, expect a render with twice the resolution (i.e. four 
times the pixels) to simply take about four times as long; or, more 
generally, multiplying the resolution by N will multiply your rendering 
times by N^2. Maybe a bit lower I'd guess, as some caching mechanisms 
may become more effective (provided you keep the overall level of detail 
unchanged), but probably not much. Radiosity may actually bog down the 
render more at higher resolution if you set always_sample to on (which 
is generally a bad idea but happens to be the default).


(BTW, why did you post this in povray.off-topic?)

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