Since the beans have been spilled already, it's no use denying it
anymore -- v3.7.1-beta.3 is available on GitHub:

https://github.com/POV-Ray/povray/releases/tag/v3.7.1-beta.3

Besides fixing a few bugs, this version should also improve performance
on 64-bit Windows machines over the previous beta -- especially if your
scene makes plenty use of noise and your CPU supports AVX2 and FMA3
(thanks to hand-optimized code courtesy of Intel); other scenes and CPUs
should also profit though.

Unfortunately this performance gain comes at the cost of dropping
support for Windows XP (and Windows Server 2003). In order to still be
able to provide some level of support for these legacy operating
systems, we have therefore decided to keep the 32-bit binaries
XP-compatible for now, which on the other hand means that users of later
32-bit Windows versions will miss out on the performance improvements.

Note that the choice between XP-compatibility and performance is a
matter of the build tool used (Visual Studio 2010 will generate
XP-compatible binaries, while Visual Studio 2015 will generate faster
ones), so 64-bit XP-compatible binaries /can/ still be built from the
source code, as can faster 32-bit binaries.

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