On Mon, 2009-06-22 at 18:53 -0400, Ibrahim Moustafa wrote:

Dear Chimera team,

  Recently, I have some trouble saving images with POV-RAY option

“true”. The process of rendering is too slow (both on the mac and

windows version).

To give the feeling of how slow: rendering an image with 1700 lines

takes 7 hrs (with quality 9 in pov-ray options) and 2 hrs (quality 5).

I used to get the images rendered much faster than that (with older

versions; however, I’m not exactly sure of when I started to see such

a slow rendering behavior).

...

I have seen the same behavior.  I want to create some images for posters
in my lab, but the time has gone up roughly 7 to 10 fold for images at
the same settings as before.

An additional problem is that 2D label letters are not properly
rendered, with the result looking like the letters have lost their tops,
being sliced off at a slanting angle.  There is scattered "debris" as
well in the images.