1.6 Understanding POV-Ray Options

Options are what previous versions of POV-Ray used to refer to as command-line options. The term is no longer accurate for POV-Ray 3.x, because the command line is only one way of passing options to the program. The other, more convenient way, is to use INI files.

1.6.1 Special Command-Line Options

POV-Ray for Unix supports several special command-line options not recognized by other versions. They follow the standards for programs that run under the X Window System.

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

-display <display_name>

Display preview on display_name rather than the default display. This is meant to be used to change the display to a remote host. The normal dispay option +d is still valid.

-geometry [WIDTHxHEIGHT][+XOFF+YOFF]

Render the image with WIDTH and HEIGHT as the dimensions, and locate the window XOFF from the left edge, and YOFF from the top edge of the screen, or if negative the right and bottom edges respectively.
For instance: -geometry 640x480+10+20 creates a display for a 640x480 image placed at (10,20) pixels from the top-left corner of the screen. The WIDTH and HEIGHT, if given, override any previous +Wn and +Hn settings.

-help

Display the X Window System-specific options. Use-H by itself on the command-line to output the general POV-Ray options.

-icon

Start the preview window as an icon.

-title <window_title>

Override the default preview window title with window_title.

-visual <visual_type>

Use the deepest visual of visual_type, if available, instead of the automatically selected visual.

Valid visual_type values:

• StaticGray
• GrayScale
• StaticColor
• PseudoColor
• TrueColor
• DirectColor

Note: If you are supplying a filename with spaces in it, you will need to enclose the filename itself within quotes.

1.6.2 Benchmark Rendering Mode

POV-Ray for Unix has a built-in version of the standard benchmark scene. In version 3.7 the built-in benchmark mode has been further modified to run without accessing any other distribution files, so now benchmarking can now be done with just the compiled executable.

To run this scene use the --benchmark command line option:

povray --benchmark

Note that running the benchmark takes some time, on a 3 GHz AMD x2 250 processor with 4GB ram, about 12 minutes. There will be no image or file output from this render. For more information on the standard POV-Ray benchmark have a look at the Benchmarking with POV-Ray page.