Can someone give a good argument why precisely 2 threads is a good default
for unix povray?

  Personally I would use 4. Usually there's no penalty in using more
threads (well, at least based on my experiments with winpov), so in
single-processor-single-core systems it won't matter, but in dual-core
systems the performance might be slightly better than with just 2 threads.
And since quad systems are becoming very soon, 4 threads will then
automatically use all the 4 cores (perhaps not at *maximum* efficiency,
but very close to it at least). 2 threads would not achieve this.
  Computers with more than 4 CPU cores are so rare that it's not
unreasonable to expect the user to specify more threads by hand if he
happens to be rendering in one.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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