Reading all those reports, I decided to have a look at my problems with
POV-Ray 3.5 build 173 again - I had just put them aside because I didn't
have time to do any raytracing anyway at that time. It turns out that I'm
having exactly the same problems as Martin and other people. I have tested
it on a PowerBook G4 (867MHz, 768MB RAM, MacOS 9.2.2 german, CarbonLib 1.6),
a PowerMac 7300 (200MHz, 192MB RAM, MacOS 9.2.2 US, CarbonLib 1.4) and a
PowerBook G3 "Wallstreet" (266MHz, 192MB RAM, MacOS 9.2.2 US, CarbonLib
1.6), and the results are the same everywhere, rendering skyvase.pov,
biscuit.pov and other sample scenes:

With preemptive threading off:

o The render progress dialog keeps showing the text "Start", a barber pole,
and no meaningful figures ("0000000" for "Total Objects", "-" for all
others) for the whole time until I quit POV-Ray. It doesn't even change or
disappear after the rendering has finished.

o The message window doesn't display anything about options, parsing,
rendering, or stats, just the copyright notice.

o After the preview window appears, rendering goes at a "normal" pace
(depending on the machine of course) for about 30 seconds (exactly until a
full scanline is rendered and displayed), and the menu bar clock (configured
to display seconds) updates about every second.

o Afterwards, one scanline is rendered and displayed about every minute (+-1
second). The rendering of the scanline itself is as fast as before, the long
pauses only occur between scanlines. During the rendering, the menubar clock
updates about every second (on the machines that are slow enough to observe
this), and the GUI is responsive. During the pause, the menubar clock
doesn't update, and the GUI doesn't respond to menubar clicks and other
events until the next minute.

o After rendering has finished, the only enabled items in the render menu
are still "Stop rendering" and "Pause rendering...". Choosing stop has no
effect (as has pressing the stop button in the progress window), pause does
nothing but change the menu item to "Resume Rendering..." (and vice versa).

Furthermore, this is independent on

o the setting of the render priority slider (except for the GUI responsivity
if it is at the highest setting (formerly known as "tyrannical"))
o whether fast preview is on or off
o whether the preview window is displayed at all (judging from observing the
menubar clock)
o whether file output is on or off
o how much memory POV-Ray gets

With preemptive threading on, everything works as it should, except for the
-10000 error when quitting in the middle of a render.

Hope this helps (or tell me if I can do anything else)

 Christian

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