Al Zimmerman wrote:
> 
> Does anyone know if POV spends more time shading or performing ray
> intersection ??  Assume the time spent traversing the database is
> included with the ray intersection time.
> 
> Thanks in advance,
> 
> Al



Definitely, it's spending its time on intersection tests.  When I added
the color dispersion feature to my personally hacked version of POV-Ray,
I changed all the colors from float[3] to float[9] - triple-sized
arrays.  This had to be done everywhere - pigments, reflection
calculations, refractions, etc.   When i ran this new povray, it ran
maybe only 5% slower - it wasn't easy to measure the difference, as my
computer runs other things in the background all the time.  If shading
calculations were taking up most of the time, the new povray would have
run 2-3 times slower.


-- 

Daren Scot Wilson
Member, ACM
dar### [at] pipelinecom
www.newcolor.com
---------------------------
"If we aren't supposed to eat animals, why are they made of meat?" 
                                            -- unknown

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