This page will provide you with links to the official POV-Ray version 3.6 binaries
and support files. All POV-Ray files are covered by one of our licences, as below:
Use of POV-Ray is governed by our end-user license
You must agree to this license before using any POV-Ray software or files. The installation
or use of POV-Ray indicates your agreement and it is thus not necessary to write us saying so.
Distribution and Modification of POV-Ray is governed by our distribution license
and source license. Please refer to those documents before
re-distributing or modifying any POV-Ray files.
Beta of POV-Ray 3.7 (Windows and Linux)
Our beta page has available a beta-test
version of POV-Ray for the Microsoft Windows and Linux platforms. The most significant
change from the end-user point of view between versions 3.6 and 3.7 is the addition of SMP
(symmetric multiprocessing) support, which in a nutshell allows the renderer to run on as many
CPU's (or cores) as you have installed on your computer. This will be particularly useful for those
users who intend purchasing a dual-core CPU or who already have a two (or more) processor machine.
Note: If you don't already have POV-Ray version 3.61 installed, and want to use the Windows beta
mentioned above, you will need to download it from this page before getting the beta, as the beta depends
on files included with version 3.61.
What's New
Version 3.6 has many internal differences from 3.5, mostly to prepare for the move to v4.0.
From a users perspective, there are no major differences in the way the program is used. There
have been numerous changes made to improve stability and speed, however as a rule you should
expect most scenes to render identically as compared to v3.5.
The current official version of POV-Ray is 3.6.1, which was released on 3 August 2004. There
is a brief list of changes from 3.6.0 available. The Win32
version is at 3.6.1c, which is basically equivalent to 3.6.1 however has changes to the editor
to bring it in line with the Win64 version, plus some other windows-specific changes. 3.6.1c
was released on 3 April 2006.
Windows
The POV-Ray for Windows 32-bit version requires at least Windows 95, Microsoft HTML Help and at least Internet Explorer 3 (for the HTML Help engine).
Internet Explorer 4 or later is strongly recommended so as to ensure the correct functioning of the documentation.
Note that the Win32 version is at 3.6.1c, which is functionally equivalent to the 64-bit 3.6.1.
The below 64-bit version requires Windows XP Professional x64 Edition. It will not install on a 32-bit OS,
even if it is hosted on a 64-bit CPU. Just having an AMD64 is not sufficient - you must also have the above x64
edition of XP installed. If you don't know what version of POV-Ray for Windows you need, you want the above 32-bit
one.
Requires at least Mac OS 9.2 or at least Mac OS X 10.2.8. Using Mac OS
9.2.2 is strongly recommended. For Mac OS CarbonLib 1.6 is required.
Note: You need at least StuffIt Expander 5.0 to unpack these archives.
We strongly recommend using StuffIt Expander 5.1 (which works much better with non-US Mac OS versions).
Important: Some users with an Intel-Mac (any Mac sold in 2007 or later as well as some 2006 models) have
reported problems running POV-Ray 3.6. These problems are due to Apple's PowerPC emulator crashing for an unknown
reason. The emulator is part of Mac OS X and out of POV-Ray's control. Numerous users, including all POV-Ray
developers with Macs, have no problems. We suspect some weird configuration issue at this point, which only
Apple service could help with if you are experiencing this problem. We cannot do anything about it, so sending
us bug reports will not solve your problem. Sorry!
Requires a glibc-2.2 based GNU/Linux system running on x86 hardware.
Please see this page for installation instructions.
There is also a handy list of Unix tools that can be used with POV-Ray.
This source code is not needed to run the software on Windows, Mac OS
or Linux, but is useful for the programmers out there who want to take a
look at the source code, make modification or port it to a new platform.
Note: Distribution of modified versions of POV-Ray
is subject to our distribution license
as modified by the terms of our source license.
Download gzipped tarball (9 MB)
[HTTP]
[FTP]
Download bzipped tarball (8 MB)
[HTTP]
[FTP]
The bzip2 utility can be found here.
Read README
Documentation
Documentation is included with all versions of POV-Ray, so you do not
need to download any of the below files unless you want a printable
version or otherwise prefer a different format. We provide our printable
documentation in both international A4 and US letter sizes
(here's why),
in PDF, PostScript, and TeX formats.
If you are looking for older versions of POV-Ray or for versions
of platforms for which official support has been discontinued,
check out our FTP server.
