I hope you don't mind this mostly OT post, but I thought you might
like some good news and comments for a change.

POV reports that the "Render" -> "Run Benchmark" menu option takes
about one hour to execute on a 2GHz Pentium 4 machine. Well, you might
want to revise that warning dialog, just before you release the final
version of POV-Ray. I just ran the official benchmark from that menu,
and it rendered in only 46 minutes, 26 seconds. 

The system I used has 256Megs of PC133 SDRAM (not DDR), runs WIN98se
(with virtual memory disabled), and is powered by an  Athlon XP 1600+,
which has an actual clock speed of 1.4 GHz, and is usually rated to
compare favorably with a 1.6 GHz Pentium 4, not the 2GHz Pentium 4
that POV-Ray cites as a reference. 

In other words, my "slower" machine just rendered your scene much
faster than your warning dialog led me to believe it would. It seems
that someone has done a good job of tweaking POV's speed, and I really
want to thank them for it. However, I still think you might want to
update that dialog box that warns about a 1 hour render, just before
POV becomes finalized. I'm hoping that by then, my render time drops
to a mere 1/2 hour.   :)


Thanks very much, and keep up the good work!

Glen

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Glen Berry wrote:

> I hope you don't mind this mostly OT post, but I thought you might
> like some good news and comments for a change.
> 
> POV reports that the "Render" -> "Run Benchmark" menu option takes
> about one hour to execute on a 2GHz Pentium 4 machine. Well, you might
> want to revise that warning dialog, just before you release the final
> version of POV-Ray. I just ran the official benchmark from that menu,
> and it rendered in only 46 minutes, 26 seconds. 
> 


Well, it renders in 4 hours 14 minutes 41 seconds on
P-2 400MHz under W98 (with some other applications, normal priorities).
Maybe it was sized down too much (seems it's missing 1/5) ?

Anyway, remember also that Athlon are better than P4 at FPU.

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> Anyway, remember also that Athlon are bettern tahn P4 at FPU.
Holy cow! What am I supposed to buy for my new computer? Athlon, Intel?
Heeeeelp!

--
Apache
POV-Ray Cloth experiments: http://geitenkaas.dns2go.com/experiments/
Email: apa### [at] yahoocom
ICQ: 146690431

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In article <3d06a3fe@news.povray.org> , "Apache" 
<apa### [at] yahoocom> wrote:

>> Anyway, remember also that Athlon are bettern tahn P4 at FPU.
> Holy cow! What am I supposed to buy for my new computer? Athlon, Intel?
> Heeeeelp!

Did it occur to you that the two hour message may just be outdated...?

    Thorsten

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Apache <apa### [at] yahoocom> wrote:
> Holy cow! What am I supposed to buy for my new computer? Athlon, Intel?
> Heeeeelp!

  Certainly don't buy a P4. You will be paying a lot more for a lot less
computing power.

-- 
#macro M(A,N,D,L)plane{-z,-9pigment{mandel L*9translate N color_map{[0rgb x]
[1rgb 9]}scale<D,D*3D>*1e3}rotate y*A*8}#end M(-3<1.206434.28623>70,7)M(
-1<.7438.1795>1,20)M(1<.77595.13699>30,20)M(3<.75923.07145>80,99)// - Warp -

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> POV reports that the "Render" -> "Run Benchmark" menu option takes
> about one hour to execute on a 2GHz Pentium 4 machine. Well, you might
> want to revise that warning dialog, just before you release the final
> version of POV-Ray. I just ran the official benchmark from that menu,
> and it rendered in only 46 minutes, 26 seconds.

I got nearly the same with Athlon TBird 1.4GHz (46:57)

I looked up the help for benchmark (Windows specific: 1.10.7.1.5), and it
says, that the author of Povray for Windows (That would be Chris Cason) ran
the benchmark with the final release of 3.5:
"(note that this was with POV-Ray for Windows v3.5 final release)"
is there a "not" missing?

The average PPS of the mentioned P4 2000: 54.04 PPS leads exactly to one hour
: (512*384)/54.04=3638sec, 3600 would be an hour.

The problem is, that povray isn't running the benchmark with 512*384, but
with 384*384 instead, this can be seen in the message-window:

<quote from message-stream>
Running standard POV-Ray benchmark version 1.01

Persistence of Vision(tm) Ray Tracer Version 3.5.beta.RC6 win32 (.icl)
  This is a time-limited beta test version.  No re-distribution
   of any sort is permitted.
...
...

Output Options
  Image resolution 384 by 384 (rows 1 to 384, columns 1 to 384).
</quote from message-stream>


(Taking this into account, those Athlons would take 1 hour and 2.5 minutes.
-> not too fast anymore)

There's one thing to add:

This benchmark generates a warning:

<quote from message-stream>
Warning: The maximum gradient found was 2.626, but max_gradient of the
isosurface was set to 2.400. The isosurface may contain holes!
Adjust max_gradient to get a proper rendering of the isosurface.
</quote from message-stream>

Maybe this is right, I don't know (perhaps the benchmark is tweaked to look
good and be "fast"; at least not unnecessarily slow...)

cukk

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