In article <35BAD03F.69A60413@kjopen.globalnet.co.uk> , Nei### [at] kjopenglobalnetcouk 
wrote:

>I mean
>    one 333MHz CPU would render faster than
>    two 300MHz CPU's    ?

With the official version and only one POV-Ray running - YES! (OK, the dual machine
might still be useful if you want to do something else during rendering - in theory
most other threads should then run on the other CPU, but modern OS are so complex, you
can never make a sure statement about what will happen in such a special case).


____________________________________________________
Thorsten Froehlich
e-mail: Tho### [at] csicom

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So if you had a choice between;
    a Sun Workstation (UltraSparc 333MHz, 3D Creater, etc.)
        and
    a PC (PII 400Mhz, etc)

If price wasn't an issue, and the machine was to be used for purely
graphics (rendering etc.), which would you choose ?

Neil

Ps. Thanks for every ones comments.

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In article <35BB7796.9C7114DD@kjopen.globalnet.co.uk> , Nei### [at] kjopenglobalnetcouk 
wrote:

>So if you had a choice between;
>    a Sun Workstation (UltraSparc 333MHz, 3D Creater, etc.)
>        and
>    a PC (PII 400Mhz, etc)
>
>If price wasn't an issue, and the machine was to be used for purely
>graphics (rendering etc.), which would you choose ?

I would take the Sun because of the overall faster system and the much faster FPU, but
another important note: A 3D accelerator won't improve the speed of POV-Ray!


Thorsten

____________________________________________________
Thorsten Froehlich
e-mail: Tho### [at] csicom

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Thorsten Froehlich wrote:
> 
> In article <35BAD03F.69A60413@kjopen.globalnet.co.uk> , Nei### [at] kjopenglobalnetcouk 
wrote:
> 
> >I mean
> >    one 333MHz CPU would render faster than
> >    two 300MHz CPU's    ?
> 
> With the official version and only one POV-Ray running - YES! (OK, the dual machine
might still be useful if you want to do something else during rendering - in theory
most other threads should then run on the other CPU, but modern OS are so complex, you
can never make a sure statement about what will happen in such a special case).
> 
> ____________________________________________________
> Thorsten Froehlich
> e-mail: Tho### [at] csicom

	Notice he keeps saying the official version. :) If you run Linux (and I
believe this has been ported to NT, though I'm not sure how well it
works.) you can run Pov-pvm which can utilize dual procs, or rendering
over a network of machines.  It can be a bit of work to setup, but a
cluster of much cheaper cpus will usually beat out a single proc one,
unless you have ALOT, (and I mean ALOT) of geometry, in which the parse
times could outweigh the render time.  This would usually only be the
case if you have 10s of millions-billions of polys/prims, in which case
you really shouldn't be using povray anyways, there are other renderers
that can handle this many objects much nicer.

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Nei### [at] kjopenglobalnetcouk wrote:
> 
> So if you had a choice between;
>     a Sun Workstation (UltraSparc 333MHz, 3D Creater, etc.)
>         and
>     a PC (PII 400Mhz, etc)
> 
> If price wasn't an issue, and the machine was to be used for purely
> graphics (rendering etc.), which would you choose ?
> 
> Neil
> 
> Ps. Thanks for every ones comments.

	Well, if your only doing povray work, the 3D gfx hardware isn't really
going to help you too much for povray, though I'm not sure whats out
there for sun.  You may have other uses for it.  Lately it seems as
though SUN hardware, atleast in the lower end bracket costs somewhat
more than SGI hardware.  Both the SGI and Sun machines are going to kick
a PC's butt for doing anything realtime, from modelling to video
playback, especially if your running one of the various *nix oses on the
PC.
        If you simply want rendering speed, your best bet is most likely
to go with K6-233/66s in cheap older socket7 mbs.  Then you can use
cheap EDO ram, and (this is what I would do) build an enclosure for
maybe 10-20 Mbs, and feed them all power off one central source.  While
the K6 isn't  a terribly fast cpu for floating point, the
price/proformance ratio is pretty good, on www.pricewatch.com I believe
you could find the chip selling for around $90.  Network cards are also
selling pretty cheap if you look in the right places, I've picked up
used ElinkIIIs for about $3.  With all this, you could setup a cluster
of linux machines, and run pvmpov.  The only problem with this setup is
that each machine needs it's own amount of ram, and each machine has to
parse the file, which can get redundant.  This kind of setup works best
for Scenes with low parse time, higher render times, and smaller amounts
of memory.  So basically scenes that don't have too much geometry, but
are being rendered at very high resolutions, and have fpu intensive
options enabled. (focal blur/Radiosity). This type of setup would also
work well for longer animations, in which case you wouldn't run pvm at
all, you would simply want to assign each machine a set number of
frames. another option rather than a K6 cluster would be a smaller Dual
ppro cluster.  it would mean less network cards, less power needed, and
less space, though the dual MB prices are still up there.  The 180mhz
ppro chips are selling for around $100 I believe.  They DO overclock to
200 nicely as well.  a setup of 10 of these boxes would be able to
easily do the job, and given enough ram, could still work well for
complex geometry scenes, especially if it's for an animation.  If you
are rendering scenes that are in the hundreds of megabytes of ram
though, and arn't planning on animating them, it may be better to go
with 1 machine with 256-512MB of ram, and a very fast cpu.  (21264 alpha
would do the job nicely).

                                        Nite_Hawk

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If you include the Alpha processor as a top-end PC then that is the best
platform for rendering.  The 21164 - 667MHz is the fastest single processor
system for rendering now.  Or wait 3 months and get a 21264 for twice the
performance.

mark

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Mikael Gustafsson wrote:
> 
> Nei### [at] kjopenglobalnetcouk wrote in message
> <35BAD03F.69A60413@kjopen.globalnet.co.uk>...
> >I mean
> >    one 333MHz CPU would render faster than
> >    two 300MHz CPU's    ?
> >
> >Neil
> >
> 
> At least on a WinNT machine, because it does not have native support for
> multi processing, and the
> POV-Ray code doesn't support it natively either (I think, someone correct me
> if I'm wrong).


Well, the POV-Ray code is not multithreaded, but NT will utilize both
processors for multi-threaded apps.

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Nite_Hawk <nel### [at] mailminnehahapvtk12mnus> writes:
[...]
>         If you simply want rendering speed, your best bet is most likely
> to go with K6-233/66s in cheap older socket7 mbs.  Then you can use
> cheap EDO ram, and (this is what I would do) build an enclosure for
> maybe 10-20 Mbs, and feed them all power off one central source.  While
> the K6 isn't  a terribly fast cpu for floating point, the
> price/proformance ratio is pretty good, on www.pricewatch.com I believe
> you could find the chip selling for around $90.  Network cards are also
> selling pretty cheap if you look in the right places, I've picked up
> used ElinkIIIs for about $3.  With all this, you could setup a cluster
> of linux machines, and run pvmpov.  The only problem with this setup is
> that each machine needs it's own amount of ram, and each machine has to
> parse the file, which can get redundant.  This kind of setup works best
> for Scenes with low parse time, higher render times, and smaller amounts
> of memory.  So basically scenes that don't have too much geometry, but
> are being rendered at very high resolutions, and have fpu intensive
> options enabled. (focal blur/Radiosity). 
[...]

Just one remark to your detailed description: Currently radiosity isn't
working with pvmpov.

Thomas

-- 
Tho### [at] uni-konstanzde
http://www.informatik.uni-konstanz.de/~willhalm/
Tschieses lavs ju
An den BND: Eisbombe Fremdenfuehrer Siegfried Heilsarmee

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