Understanding POV-Ray Options
Special Command-Line Options
Benchmark Rendering Mode

POV-Ray for Unix version 3.7

## 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 builtin version of the standard benchmark scene. 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.