> Given all everybody has said - why the heck use 64bit processors with Pov
> -at all- then?

Two different questions going on.
(1) Why upgrade your computer?
(2) And why is a 64 bit compile of POV not that much faster than
a 32 bit compile?

(1) If you go from an Athlon to a 64 bit Opteron or Nocona,
if it supports DDR2, you might see a 2-3x speed increase. If you go
from a Xenon to that it might only be a 1.5x increase. The bottleneck
being the memory speed, 400Mbps DDR2 (64 bit) might run nearly
identical to a 400Mbps DDR (32 bit), with little real difference resulting,
but 667Mbps DDR2 will be faster.

(2) A 64 bit machine will already try to take advantage of it's improved
achitecture to run 32 bit programs faster, so optimizing only helps a bit.
It might be possible to tweak POV to use 64 bit integer math at a
processor level (fixed point), but that would probably break cross-
platform compatability, and floating point is perty fast anyways.

Post a reply to this message