On Tue, 29 Feb 2000 08:19:31 +0100, Karl Pelzer
<Kar### [at] t-onlinede> wrote:

>I know, this might have been asked quite often. But is there a listing
>of POV versions running on multiprocessor platfoms?
>I'm especially thinking of a dual celeron solution.
>What OS do I need (NT,Linux,...)?
>Any suggestions. Anyone already made experiences with this matter?
>
>Karl

Being the lazy bum that I am, I'll just copy & paste from a reply I
send to the exact same question a couple of days ago. Here we go...

POV-Ray is indeed currently incapable of making use of SMPs. 
There have been PVM ports of POV-Ray but I don't think a 3.1 one 
is available let alone MegaPOV.

But, there is always a workaround :) If you can't take advantage of 
multithreading, do so with multitasking. Run two instances of POV 
and give each of them a separate portion of the image. Depending 
on the image, one part may take significantly longer to render than 
the other, imposing some difficulties. There are three basic ways to 
split up the work:

1. Give the top half of the image to one instance of POV and the 
bottom half -- to the other one.

2. The same, but use left/right halves instead.

3. Make one instance render the odd lines and the other instance -- 
the even lines. To do so, type this in the command line (the INI file 
won't work because both files share a single povray.ini):

+uf +kfi0 +kff1 +ef0

and this in the command line of the second instance of POV:

+uf +kfi0 +kff1 +sf1

This will make two images, say output0.tga and output1.tga . The 
first one will contain the even lines and the second one will contain 
the odd lines. Open the images in a paint program and deinterlace 
them.

I hope this works OK for you.


Peter Popov
pet### [at] usanet
ICQ: 15002700

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