"Anthony D. Baye" <Sha### [at] spamnomorehotmailcom> wrote:

> Not according to Blinn's Law: "As Technology advances, Rendering time remains
> constant."
>
> This is because, rather than using new technologies to make already good scenes
> faster, we use it to make them better.  We use techniques that would have been
> too expensive, time-wise, before, but are now feasible due to faster equipment.

I would imagine that's true, although I was thinking along the lines of using
faster computer processing to render a similar scene.

Perhaps an idea to entertain would be something along the lines of the +q
quality level - be able to render this way or that (using different features,
not in the way +q is used) depending upon if you want speed or image quality.
Sort of like substituting with the closest font family when the one you want
isn't available.
As that would probably be difficult to implement, maybe just start off with
messages in the stream { #speednotes(true) } that suggest a potentially faster
method of doing or approximating the same thing.

Though if there are "code upgrades" where one method used for POV-Ray 3.1 was
chosen because the way it's done in {future} POV-Ray 7.3 would have been
impossible, then the speed switch would revert to the old internal code.

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