Hi all-

I just wanted to share some benchmarks I've done with POV Ray 3.5c on a G5
running OSX 10.2.8. The box is the "middle version" with a single 1.8ghz G5
processor and 4gig(!) of ram. It's basically the stock box from Apple. All
tests were done using the benchmark.pov and benchmark.ini file, and all were
rendered via the Unix source code compiled on the machine natively.

POV Ray compiled with gcc3.3 as part of fink distribution (no
optimizations):
Parse Time: 6 seconds
Photon Time: 1 minute, 12 seconds
Trace Time: 43 minutes, 18 seconds
Total Time: 44 minutes, 36 seconds

POV Ray compiled with G5 optimizations in gcc3.3
(switches -mcpu=970 -mtune=970 -mpowerpc64 -mpowerpc-gpopt)
Parse Time: 5 seconds
Photon Time: 1 minute, 6 seconds
Trace Time: 46 minutes, 54 seconds
Total Time: 48 minutes, 5 seconds

POV Ray compiled with IBM's xlC V6.0 BETA compiler
(switches -qarch=ppc970 -qtune=ppc970 -qalign=natural -O3)
Parse Time: 6 seconds
Photon Time: 1 minute, 17 seconds
Trace Time: 43 minutes, 56 seconds
Total Time: 45 minutes, 19 seconds

I would think that POV Ray would always benefit from better floating point
performance, but I could be mistaken. I'd be willing to rerun any and all
tests with any other variations if asked. :)

Again this is an unscientific test done by me for my own amusement ("So what
can I do with this G5 thing?")

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