Mesa is an OpenGL clone, (Lib-GPL). It includes demos, so that you can see what kind of 3-D rendering it does. You might prefer to install it into /usr/src/mesa, eg by creating a sym-link.

	ftp iris.ssec.wisc.edu
	tar -zxf ...
	
	cd /tmp/pkgs_ftp/Mesa-1.2.6
	make
	make linux-elf
	(takes as long as the kernel)
	su
		vi /etc/ld.so.conf # add /tmp/pkgs_ftp/Mesa-1.2.6/lib to list
		ldconfig
			

I'm not a Mesa user, but it will be one of the surface texture renderers used in 3D-browsers, and I hear that it's close to standard.

I went through the demo, which tended to highlight a particular prgramming feature, or use of lighting. Most of them display a sphere, cube, cone, with some significant variation on lighlting, perspective, shading (etc).

The demos are quick, but generally simple (except for the cogs demo), and low-res. Ie I don't know how long it would take to pov-ray a tea-pot, but I guess that if you are a Mesa user, you would be able to benchmark it.