Q: Is POV-Ray for DOS faster than POV-Ray for windows?

  A: To my surprise the answer is: No.

  It has been a known fact, that POV-Ray for Windows has been always slower
than POV-Ray for DOS.
  This seem to be no longer true, at least with the MSVC compilation of
POV-Ray 3.1e for Windows.

  I made a comprehensive test about this.
  The machine: Pentium II 350MHz with 64 Megabytes of RAM.
  The programs: All the tested programs are the 3.1e version of POV-Ray.
I tested with three compilations: The official MSVC compilation of
POV-Ray for Windows, the official Watcom compilation of POV-Ray for DOS
and my own DJGPP compilation of POV-Ray for DOS (with optimization flags
-O3 -mpentiumpro -funroll_loops).
  The Windows version was run at the maximum priority without any other
programs running. The DOS versions were run from a raw DOS but with only
himem and smartdrv (except for the memory hog test in which I freed the
2 Megs occupied by smartdrv). For some strange reason I was unable to
make the cwsdpmi (the dos extender required by djgpp) to swap when it run
out of memory so there's no results for the memory hog test for the djgpp
compile. The DOS versions were also run with display turned off (the
Windows version was run with it turned on).
  All tests were rendered at 640x480 pixels with antialiasing 0.1.
  There was one big problem with the memory hog test with the DOS POV-Ray:
After rendering, the program spent about 20 minutes (!) just freeing the
swap file. The Windows version spent only a couple of minutes freeing the
memory.

  So, the results:

Test1: 3 spheres
  WinPov: 7 sec          DosPovWat: 3 sec          DosPovGcc: 4 sec

Test2: 10000 spheres
  WinPov: 1 min 4 sec    DosPovWat: 59 sec         DosPovGcc: 1 min 2 sec

Test3: 4 planes
  WinPov: 34 seconds     DosPovWat: 30 sec         DosPovGcc: 29 sec

Test4: 180 planes
  WinPov: 4 min 50 sec   DosPovWat: 4 min 51 sec   DosPovGcc: 5 min 30 sec

Test5: 1 lathe
  WinPov: 25 seconds     DosPovWat: 27 sec         DosPovGcc: 28 sec

Test6: 400 lathes
  WinPov: 13 min 37 sec  DosPovWat: 15 min 24 sec  DosPovGcc: 16 min 22 sec

Test7: 218 objects (boxes, cylinders, torus, etc. using CSG, textures,
       reflection...)
  WinPov: 45 sec         DosPovWat: 42 sec         DosPovGcc: 46 sec

Test8.1: 7301 objects (of diverse type in CSG), 100 fading light sources and
         2 area lights (memory hog, had to swap)
  WinPov: 24 min 58 sec  DosPovWat: 41 min 6 sec

Test8.2: Same scene but with only 50 light sources
  WinPov: 22 min 31 sec  DosPovWat: 24 min 16 sec

Test9: 7 glass objects (using caustics), 1 plane, focal blur
  WinPov: 29 min 17 sec  DosPovWat: 30 min 46 sec  DosPovGcc: 31 min 33 sec

Test10: A 512x512 heightfield with a 512x512 image map
  WinPov: 1 min 58 sec   DosPovWat: 2 min 11 sec   DosPovGcc: 2 min 1 sec

Test11: 81 copies of that heightfield
  WinPov: 5 min 55 sec   DosPovWat: 6 min 42 sec   DosPovGcc: 6 min 19 sec

Test12: A little mesh, a plane and scattering media
  WinPov: 5 min 57 sec   DosPovWat: 5 min 33 sec   DosPovGcc: 6 min 58 sec

Test13: Some simple objects, an area light and radiosity
  WinPov: 17 min 35 sec  DosPovWat: 28 min 24 sec  DosPovGcc: 21 min 14 sec


-- 
main(i,_){for(_?--i,main(i+2,"FhhQHFIJD|FQTITFN]zRFHhhTBFHhhTBFysdB"[i]
):5;i&&_>1;printf("%s",_-70?_&1?"[]":" ":(_=0,"\n")),_/=2);} /*- Warp -*/

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