"Thorsten Froehlich" <nomail@nomail> wrote in message 
news:web.520bbf49e896405b45eb5620@news.povray.org...
> "Anthony D. Baye" <Sha### [at] spamnomorehotmailcom> wrote:
>> scott <sco### [at] scottcom> wrote:
>> > > now, from what I've read, it takes more than a thousand iterations to 
>> > > get good
>> > > results, but trying to do just fifty iterations makes POV do an 
>> > > imitation of
>> > > PAC-Man with my memory and swap space.  All 16GB of it.
>> > >
>> > > I don't know if this is a bug or a natural limitation of the geometry 
>> > > parsing
>> > > engine.
>> >
>> > It looks to me like at each iteration you are doubling the number of
>> > objects POV has in memory (by creating an intersection of two versions
>> > of the previous object). That means after 50 iterations you will have
>> > about 2^50 objects - I'm surprised you got that far!
>>
>> That's about what I figured was happening.  And I didn't get that far 
>> because
>> I had to shut it down.
>
> And no matter what you do, you won't be able to get that many with POV on 
> any
> system available on this planet today. Even with references, and no
> transformations, it would take 8 petabytes (8192 terabytes) just to store 
> the
> references. Realistically you might get 2^30 spheres on a PC, but not with 
> a
> regular Windows (you need the a server variant, desktop variants only 
> support 64
> GB of RAM) as you will probably need 256 to 512 GB of RAM for it. Or you 
> need a
> lot of fast swap space.

and the website link shows a 10,000-iteration version.

 -Shay

Post a reply to this message