>> A thousand times faster? I have yet to see anybody with 56 Mbit/sec 
>> broadband. ;-)
> 
>   It was a figure of speech. And it wasn't all that far-fetched either.
> Some people *do* have even faster connections than that, and at a rational
> price. A friend of mine could download over 10 MB/s (mega*bytes*, not bits).

Well hell, when I was at Uni 10 years ago [OMG, I'M OLD!!] we had a 100 
Mbit/sec connection to the Internet. Back in the days of 12 kbps modems.

Do you know what "envy" looks like? Cos I did! ;-)

>   Ok, maybe not with ADSL. OTOH, 24 Mbit/s ADSL is completely normal
> (for example I could upgrade to that right now if I wanted to).

I thought the maximum speed possible with ADSLv1 is only 8 Mbit/sec? [No 
idea what it is for ADSLv2 - nobody offers that in the UK yet.]


a mere 5 Mbit/sec. [Mind you, that is *both ways*. And if it breaks, 
somebody is on 24-hour callout. And you get a dedicated IP address. And 
so forth...]

>> Er... well even today, downloading *8GB* is rather challenging.
> 
>   Not really, if you have a fast connection and good seeders.

As this discussion we've having neatly illustrates, "fast" is a relative 
term. ;-)

>   There's an example scene which comes with POV-Ray which is even more
> telling: scenes/advanced/piece3/piece3.pov. It says:
> 
> // Due to the large number of objects, you will probably have to
> // have a lot of memory to render this scene.
> // Rendering time using a 25Mhz 386 w/Cyrix fpu is approximately 60 hours.
> 
>   With a top-of-the-line modern PC you can render that exact scene in
> almost real-time (using the rt-rendering feature of pov3.7).

Weeeeee... And "they" said that real-time ray tracing would never 
happen! Obviously it's just a matter of computer power. ;-)

[Hmm, "Cyrix"? Whatever happened to them anyway?]

>> And yet, at the same time, it *still* takes forever for certain 
>> applications to start up. WTF?
> 
>   Back then programs allocated and initialized something like 200 kB of
> memory and had to read about that much data from files. Nowadays it's
> the same, but changing the kB to MB.

I'd ask why this is the case - but I imagine we won't come to any useful 
answer...

>> [Most exasperating is the length of time TF2 takes to start. But given 
>> that it's loading several GB of texture data from disk, I'll let that 
>> one go.]
> 
>   It's not only loading (and probably decompressing) the textures and
> models, it's probably transferring them to your graphics card. This is
> not one of the fastest possible operations even today (although faster
> than reading from disk).

Possibly. I don't know - my graphics card only has, what, 512 MB of RAM? 
[Off the top of my head. I might be wrong on that.] How much data can 
you possibly stuff into it? ;-)

I suppose it could quite possibly be generating MIP-maps at the same 
time. And checking the game files for corruption/hacking. (VALVe's 
anti-cheat system and all that...)

>> PS. Seriously. Why the hell is SKYVASE.POV so slow? It contains, like, a 
>> handful of quadratic primitives and a simple texture. There's no 
>> reflection or refraction, IIRC there's only 1 point-light source... why 
>> is it so slow?
> 
>   Because calculating intersections with hundreds of thousands of rays
> is cpu-intensive?

Yes, but why is SKYVASE.POV in particular so much slower than other 
scenes of apparently similar complexity?

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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