Tek wrote:
> I'm planning to build a new system, specifically for POV rendering. My only
> interest is in getting it to render pov scenes in the shortest time possible.
> Budget is pretty flexible but not completely ridiculous, somewhere in the
> thousands not tens of thousands of US dollars, and I'll be building the system
> myself so all the money will go on components/OS.
> 
> So, what I want to know is: What hardware & OS configuration will give the
> fastest povray rendering performance? And how much work would it take to get it
> all running?
> 
> I'm open to options including multi-processor, multi-machine, custom pov builds,
> etc... The only restriction is that the more work I need to do to get the thing
> running the less likely it is I'll ever find the time to do it!
> 
> My ultimate aim is to improve my overall productivity in povray: I want to have
> a fast way of rendering very complex high res still images and very long low res
> animations, without needing any manual work to set the render going and retrieve
> the result (i.e. if I have a PC farm it should be entirely automated so I don't
> have to do any more than if I were rendering on a single machine).
> 
> One final note, I'm really not interested unless the system will be a number of
> times faster than my current setup (Athlon XP 3000 overclocked to 2280MHz,
> running Windows XP), which ran the POV 3.6 beta benchmark in 28 minutes.
> 
> [...]

AMD 64bit systems (either Athlon 64 or Opteron) are probably the fastest 
single processor machines for POV-Ray at the moment.  I recently posted 
a link to a comparitive test of modern PC processors which included a 
POV-Ray test in p.off-topic.  This was running the official (32bit) 
version of POV-Ray - note that a 64bit version does not necessarily need 
to be faster.  I would not really trust the benchmark results Mike 
posted the link to because they are not verified to be correct in any way.

For multiprocessor machines and clusters you have a large number of 
possible solutions but a fast multiprocessor system will usually be 
quite expensive in comparison to a set of several inexpensive single 
processor computers.

-- 
Christoph Hormann
http://www.tu-bs.de/~y0013390/

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