Tom Galvin <tom### [at] imporg> wrote:

> Christoph Hormann <chr### [at] gmxde> wrote in
>> Warp wrote:
>>>   With current computers there's no problem in keeping the whole
>>>   image in memory, so there's no such problem anymore.
>> 
>> You have obviously never rendered a really large image...
>> 
> 8192x8192*24bit color is only 200 MB. A 256MB simm is less than $100 US.
>
Sorry, but your calculation seems to be correct. 

POVRay internally stores the image (pixels, scan lines) as COLOUR and 
converts them to RGB only for writing them to disk (or displaying). 
All the code uses COLOUR. And that would require 1280MB of RAM for 
a 8192x8192 image. The 200Mb are needed additionally for the pixmap 
buffer...   [sizeof(COLOUR)=4*5=20]

So, how much is a 2Gb simm :p

Wolfgang

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