Margus Ramst wrote:

> Actually, POV depends pretty much on raw MHz. AMD's FPU might be a
> factor, but I
> don't think the classic Pentium has a much better unit. Perhaps
> something
> radical has been done in the BIOS, like turning off all processor
> caches. I
> cannot think of any peripheral that could slow down POV by a
> significant amount.
> How is the overall system performance? Does it swap a lot? Also, could
> you give
> a benchmark time for POV (e.g. skyvase.pov @ 640x480 AA 0.3)

The overall performance of the eMachine has been very good. It has only
been POV that shocked me. It does not need to use swap space much at all
since there is 160 MB of SDRAM and the POV scenes were fairly simple
although time consuming because of reflections.

Skyvase.pov rendered in 4 minutes and 57 seconds at a quality of 9,
640x480 AA 0.3. I will also try skyvase.pov on my old P120 laptop.

I will check the BIOS to see if I have inadvertently turned off the
processor cache or something else.

Thank you for the input Margus (and others too) !


(Later the next day) Well, I found the problem now that I studied the
system a little more carefully. It seems that both Netscape under Linux
and IE5 under Windows take lots of processor time even when they are
sitting idle. I usually have a browser open almost continuously since I
use a cable modem with an always live connection. Thanks again for all
the feedback on my question, the rendering time is now what it should be
for skyvase.pov on a K6-2 333 Mhz, about 2 minutes. I just have to make
sure I close any resource hogging browsers down when they are not in use
if I am rendering a time consuming scene!

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