On Sun, 07 Jun 2009 14:41:04 -0400, Valerij Rozouvan wrote:

> Here in Kiev, Ukraine (at least my part of the town) we get power
> outages at least once a month that last for more than my UPS can handle.
> So perhaps the question I should ask: what is a good UPS scheme that
> would enable my PC to run for a day?

A fair point, and one I hadn't considered. :-)

Becomes a bit of a trick to balance performance and power savings when 
the power goes out.  If you're using a UPS daemon, you might cut the 
system's performance setting to the minimum setting rather than leaving 
it at "performance" (or whatever your distro's powersaved setting is for 
high performance computing) - set it up to power the monitor off as well 
when on the UPS and that should help (assuming your monitor is connected 
to your UPS).

Of course, getting a day out of the UPS is going to be pushing it - I've 
managed to get several hours out of my APC UPSes by shutting down all 
nonessential equipment when the power cuts out here.  But at the same 
time, a hibernate when the UPS' battery power is relatively low would 
also save you having to restart the render for the current line.

I'd also look at the suggestions clipka made as regards setting the 
threshold and antialias depth.  I once ran a render that took about 4 
months to run with the settings set to where you've got them set, and 
compared the output image to a render with settings set to a saner level 
and I couldn't see any difference between the two renders.  (I may even 
have done a binary comparison and found no differences, it's been a few 
years and I don't recall).

That should also help. :-)

Jim

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