Documentation:Unix Section 2

This document is protected, so submissions, corrections and discussions should be held on this documents talk page.

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.

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.

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.

Trademarks

Getting Started

This document is protected, so submissions, corrections and discussions should be held on this documents talk page.