1.2 Features

This section covers version 3.7 changes and new features that apply to POV-Ray for Unix. See the section Changes and New Features Summary for information about non-platform specific changes.

1.2.1 New Features

1. Reworked the built-in --benchmark
• The built-in benchmark now accepts the +L<path> command-line option
• and now ONLY reads the built-in INI file.
• It also accepts +wt to set the number of work threads
• and now also accepts the --version parameter
2. Added preliminary Linux support for these two features:
   • CPU timer; might return incorrect results depending on the platform.
   • signal catching when aborting a render by hitting Ctrl+C
3. Added support for the +P option to allow pause when done.
4. Unix default file gamma changed from from 1.0 to 2.2.

1.2.2 Display Options

The Unix version now has a single binary which supports display using the X Window System, or using the SVGA library with the console on GNU/Linux systems only, or via text graphics otherwise. If the command-line options or INI files turn on display, the following heuristic is used to determine what kind of display should be used. If the DISPLAY environment variable is set, the X Window display is used. Otherwise, if the user is on the console, and has permission to do so, SVGAlib is used. Otherwise, text graphics are used.

Text graphics display a crude 75x24 ASCII version of the image which can be useful none the less to monitor the render progress on a text terminal. Using text graphics and the Verbose +v option simultaneously will not work very well.

Note: See the section Known Bugs for more information about a problem with the X11 windows system.

1.2.3 Benchmark Mode

POV-Ray 3.7 for Unix provides a new mode to render a built-in version of the standard POV-Ray benchmark scene. See the Benchmark Rendering Mode documentation for details.

1.2.4 Sample scene render scripts

POV-Ray 3.7 includes a set of shell scripts to automatically render all the samples coming with POV-Ray and that generate HTML files to easily browse the sample scenes. See Rendering the Sample Scenes for more information.

1.2.5 KDE Integration

The binary package for x86-Linux (povlinux.tgz) comes with an install script that generates some useful entries in the KDE panel for convenient access to the POV-Ray documentation and configuration files.

The generic Unix source distribution also comes with the kde_install.sh script to perform the same task.