Thorsten Froehlich <tho### [at] trfde> wrote:
> * Hint:  Look into the available source code (profile it!) and suggested
> reading section in docs to find out more about what POV-Ray already does and
> how ray-tracing works first!

  I think that one of the biggest problems with people who try to optimize
POV-Ray (or any similar program for that matter) is that they optimize the
wrong things in the wrong ways.
  People usually thing "this should be optimized" without even taking the
trouble of measuring if that thing is consuming most of the rendering time
or not (ie. doing the so-called profiling). If POV-Ray spends 1% of the
rendering time in a certain function, it doesn't help too much to optimize
that function to be 10% faster (which would mean that the total render time
will be about 0.1% faster, so for example a 1-hour render will be reduced
to 59 minutes and 56 seconds).
  Also making a platform-dependant optimization is bad, even if you supply
an alternative using #ifdefs. It's bad because it means code repetition,
which makes changing the code harder.

-- 
#macro N(D)#if(D>99)cylinder{M()#local D=div(D,104);M().5,2pigment{rgb M()}}
N(D)#end#end#macro M()<mod(D,13)-6mod(div(D,13)8)-3,10>#end blob{
N(11117333955)N(4254934330)N(3900569407)N(7382340)N(3358)N(970)}//  - Warp -

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