Greg M. Johnson wrote:

> I just purchased a new PC.
>
> My OLD PC is an Aptiva with 64MB RAM and a 200 MHz Pentium.
> My NEW PC is an Aptiva with 256 MB RAM and a 450 MHz Pentium II.
>
> I compared the render times for three different scene files.  One was
> with Bryce, and involved transparent and reflective objects. The other
> two were in POV-Ray.  One was a human character made out of blobs of my
> own creation.  The other was the LATHE2.POV file that is found in the
> POVDEMO directory shipped with version 3.02
>
> Render times in min:sec
>
>                       OLD PC   NEW PC
> Bryce scene    29:30        2:49
> POV, blobs      0:29         0:11
> POV, lathe2     9:01         4:16
>
> What gives?  With Bryce, I get a 10X improvement in render time, but POV
> gives me less than a 3X improvement!  Does this point to some other
> "hardware" solution to a faster POV render? Could this point to a
> problem with my PC: dead memory, etc.?

No, not really. POV is float-intensive, and the speed up is proportionnalto the
processor speedup
(p2 has better fpu, about 30% faster at equal
mhz, 2.5 times the mhz on the new machine 1.3 x 2.5  = 3.25, which is
consistant with the observed speedup).

As for Bryce, I'd guess it is memory-intensive, so that it stops swapping
with 256 megs of ram. It's a bit like loading netscape on a 200 mhz machine
with 16 megs of ram... and then on a 200 mhz machine with 128. It can't
be compared. Netscape takes about 5 sec to load on my machine (a 333mhz
with 128 meg of ram)... and about 30 sec on a pentium 90 with 32 megs of
ram. ... To tell the truth, I don't use Bryce, so I can't tell the reasons. May-
be it is also sensitive to the kind of video adapter you have. Going from a
mach 64 to a 3d Rage+ II _does_ make a lot of difference.

> ___________________________
> Greg M. Johnson
> http://members.xoom.com/gregjohn

Best,

    S.

--
----------------------------------------------------------
Steven Pigeon                     Ph. D. Student.
University of Montreal.
pig### [at] iroumontrealca           Topics: data compression,
pig### [at] jspumontrealca          signal processing,
ste### [at] researchattcom           non stationnary signals
                                  and wavelets.
----------------------------------------------------------
         http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pigeon

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