Persistence of Vision Ray Tracer, or POV-Ray, is a ray tracing program which generates images from a text-based scene description.
License: Open Source
POV-Ray is a powerful, customizable ray tracing software suited for static scenes and mathematical rendering, whereas LuxRender excels in photorealistic rendering with global illumination and GPU acceleration. While POV-Ray is more focused on scene description and customization, LuxRender offers better support for modern rendering techniques and realism.