In article <37204af9.0@news.povray.org> , Nieminen Mika <war### [at] cctutfi>  
wrote:

>   Q: Is POV-Ray for DOS faster than POV-Ray for windows?
>
>   A: To my surprise the answer is: No.
>
>   It has been a known fact, that POV-Ray for Windows has been always slower
> than POV-Ray for DOS.
>   This seem to be no longer true, at least with the MSVC compilation of
> POV-Ray 3.1e for Windows.
>
>   I made a comprehensive test about this.
>   The machine: Pentium II 350MHz with 64 Megabytes of RAM.
>   The programs: All the tested programs are the 3.1e version of POV-Ray.
> I tested with three compilations: The official MSVC compilation of
> POV-Ray for Windows, the official Watcom compilation of POV-Ray for DOS
> and my own DJGPP compilation of POV-Ray for DOS (with optimization flags
> -O3 -mpentiumpro -funroll_loops).
>   The Windows version was run at the maximum priority without any other
> programs running. The DOS versions were run from a raw DOS but with only
> himem and smartdrv (except for the memory hog test in which I freed the
> 2 Megs occupied by smartdrv). For some strange reason I was unable to
> make the cwsdpmi (the dos extender required by djgpp) to swap when it run
> out of memory so there's no results for the memory hog test for the djgpp
> compile. The DOS versions were also run with display turned off (the
> Windows version was run with it turned on).
>   All tests were rendered at 640x480 pixels with antialiasing 0.1.
>   There was one big problem with the memory hog test with the DOS POV-Ray:
> After rendering, the program spent about 20 minutes (!) just freeing the
> swap file. The Windows version spent only a couple of minutes freeing the
> memory.
>
>   So, the results:
>
> Test1: 3 spheres
>   WinPov: 7 sec          DosPovWat: 3 sec          DosPovGcc: 4 sec
>
> Test2: 10000 spheres
>   WinPov: 1 min 4 sec    DosPovWat: 59 sec         DosPovGcc: 1 min 2 sec
>
> Test3: 4 planes
>   WinPov: 34 seconds     DosPovWat: 30 sec         DosPovGcc: 29 sec
>
> Test4: 180 planes
>   WinPov: 4 min 50 sec   DosPovWat: 4 min 51 sec   DosPovGcc: 5 min 30 sec
>
> Test5: 1 lathe
>   WinPov: 25 seconds     DosPovWat: 27 sec         DosPovGcc: 28 sec
>
> Test6: 400 lathes
>   WinPov: 13 min 37 sec  DosPovWat: 15 min 24 sec  DosPovGcc: 16 min 22 sec
>
> Test7: 218 objects (boxes, cylinders, torus, etc. using CSG, textures,
>        reflection...)
>   WinPov: 45 sec         DosPovWat: 42 sec         DosPovGcc: 46 sec
>
> Test8.1: 7301 objects (of diverse type in CSG), 100 fading light sources and
>          2 area lights (memory hog, had to swap)
>   WinPov: 24 min 58 sec  DosPovWat: 41 min 6 sec
>
> Test8.2: Same scene but with only 50 light sources
>   WinPov: 22 min 31 sec  DosPovWat: 24 min 16 sec
>
> Test9: 7 glass objects (using caustics), 1 plane, focal blur
>   WinPov: 29 min 17 sec  DosPovWat: 30 min 46 sec  DosPovGcc: 31 min 33 sec
>
> Test10: A 512x512 heightfield with a 512x512 image map
>   WinPov: 1 min 58 sec   DosPovWat: 2 min 11 sec   DosPovGcc: 2 min 1 sec
>
> Test11: 81 copies of that heightfield
>   WinPov: 5 min 55 sec   DosPovWat: 6 min 42 sec   DosPovGcc: 6 min 19 sec
>
> Test12: A little mesh, a plane and scattering media
>   WinPov: 5 min 57 sec   DosPovWat: 5 min 33 sec   DosPovGcc: 6 min 58 sec
>
> Test13: Some simple objects, an area light and radiosity
>   WinPov: 17 min 35 sec  DosPovWat: 28 min 24 sec  DosPovGcc: 21 min 14 sec

Which scene files did you use exactly? Any intention to make them public
(and an INI file with all the settings, too)?


    Thorsten

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