First of all, current povray version is 3.50c. One could do a version update. Second, I have written a small script that does the lengthy work of probabilistical optimization of Povray (3.50c tested, with gcc-3.2.1). In case of an Athlon/600 I got a performance improvement of about 272% to the original settings (ICC gave slightly worse results), in case of an P4/2000, I got less improvement, but still better than ICC. Maybe one could drop ICC compilation support since it's doesn't appear to be quite useful anymore.
Created attachment 7031 [details] My original script to do a probabilistic profiling and a recompilation The script uses all scene files of the original distribution (expected to be unpacked in the current directory) to create probabilistic profiles. Then it uses the profiles to recompile the source.
I've committed the script as files/prob-opt.sh. I feel the optimizations are too heavy to integrate directly into the ebuild without risking numerous bug reports relating to lack of stability, but I also feel the script should be available to interested parties, so I decided that having it in the tree but not in the ebuild was a decent compromise. I'm going to leave ICC support in the ebuild for now just for the sake of choice. Thanks. :-)
