The downside is that it takes 20 minutes to render anything remotely complicated. No-one waits that long for anything nowadays.

When browsing around on Wikipedia the other day - it's a terrifyingly addictive thing to do - I came across Terragen, a piece of landscape rendering software. The point of such a program escapes me, to be honest, but the images included in the article are really pretty. So, never one to let an opportunity for idle software testing pass me by, I downloaded it and started playing around with the settings. The results are below.

It's not great, and not photorealistic, but given that I have approximately 24 hours' experience with this program I can't believe quite how good it looks. Considering that graphics like this were the preserve of extremely high-end computing just a few years ago - and that they weren't remotely possible a few years before that - I find it amazing that I can download a 1.6MB program that can produce something this good. I may end up completely addicted to this too...