I am building a new PC for rendering images with POVRay. I am working on a
project that will require a lot of images. I have already done the work but
I still need to render. Due to the complexity of the images each image takes
over a day to render, so  speed is important.

The problem is my budget.

Question, for the Windows version of POVRay has anybody done a benchmark
comparison of how fast images render with the Althon XP processor with 133
sdram versus DRR 2100?

I know the DDR is faster but I have heard that streaming applications (not
computative intensive ones) are the big winners.

I guess that I really want to know if it would be worth the money to upgrade
to the DDR memory if my other choice were to upgrade to a 1800 or 1900
Althon (assuming that I could not afford to do both).

I have looked at some POVRay bench mark sites but they do not distinguish
sdram/DDR in an apples to apples comparison.

Thanks for any help.

Kirk

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In article <3c1ea50e@news.povray.org> , "Kirk Hubbell" <kir### [at] yahoocom>
wrote:

> I know the DDR is faster but I have heard that streaming applications (not
> computative intensive ones) are the big winners.

What is a "streaming application"?

    Thorsten

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Thorsten Froehlich wrote:

> In article <3c1ea50e@news.povray.org> , "Kirk Hubbell" <kir### [at] yahoocom>
> wrote:
> 
> 
>>I know the DDR is faster but I have heard that streaming applications (not
>>computative intensive ones) are the big winners.
>>
> 
> What is a "streaming application"?
> 


An application that handles huge chunks of data such as mpeg 
encoding/decoding, etc...

-- 
/*Francois Labreque*/#local a=x+y;#local b=x+a;#local c=a+b;#macro P(F//
/*    flabreque    */L)polygon{5,F,F+z,L+z,L,F pigment{rgb 9}}#end union
/*        @        */{P(0,a)P(a,b)P(b,c)P(2*a,2*b)P(2*b,b+c)P(b+c,<2,3>)
/*   videotron.ca  */}camera{location<6,1.25,-6>look_at a orthographic}

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Kirk Hubbell wrote:

> I am building a new PC for rendering images with POVRay. I am working on a
> project that will require a lot of images. I have already done the work but
> I still need to render. Due to the complexity of the images each image takes
> over a day to render, so  speed is important.


Did you see this ?

http://www4.tomshardware.com/column/01q4/011124/index.html

Fabien.

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"Kirk Hubbell" <kir### [at] yahoocom> schrieb im Newsbeitrag
news:3c1ea50e@news.povray.org...
> I am building a new PC for rendering images with POVRay. I am working on a
> project that will require a lot of images. I have already done the work
but
> I still need to render. Due to the complexity of the images each image
takes
> over a day to render, so  speed is important.
>
> The problem is my budget.

If you want to save money and time, give Linux a try. I compiled the sources
of POV-Ray with the Athlon optimisations of the gcc compiler and got shorter
render times than with my Windows version of POV-Ray.

So long,

Bonsai

--
        ________________
       /                \
---===|  www.b0n541.net  |===---
       \________________/

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Thorsten Froehlich wrote:
> 
> In article <3c1ea50e@news.povray.org> , "Kirk Hubbell" <kir### [at] yahoocom>
> wrote:
> 
> > I know the DDR is faster but I have heard that streaming applications (not
> > computative intensive ones) are the big winners.
> 
> What is a "streaming application"?

I don't know what this means, but I do know that DDR is better
at working on huge amounts of contiguous data, such as gigantic
meshes, enormous image maps, etc. SDRAM is said to be better
for lots of small, independant memory transfers. Hardware sites
such as the one Fabien mentionned are much better at explaining
this than me.

-- 
Adrien Beau   adr### [at] freefr   http://adrien.beau.free.fr/

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In article <3C1### [at] videotronca> , Francois Labreque 
<fla### [at] videotronca>  wrote:

>> What is a "streaming application"?
>
> An application that handles huge chunks of data such as mpeg
> encoding/decoding, etc...

Interesting name, I have never seen it before...

In response to the problem my answer then is:

Compression and decompression of data are usually very local (in memory)
operations and thus the processor speed gains you more than memory speed
given the large caches of processors.  Sure, computer companies want you to
believe you need a 10 GHz system to watch DVD movies, but that isn't true...

POV-Ray on the other hand will benefit from more and fast memory as it needs
real random access in memory over the whole memory range if a scene is large
enough.  However, it should be noted that even DDR-SDRAM still has a
specific access time for the first access which isn't much better than the
first access time of SDR-SDRAM (because decoding an address takes about the
same in either type of RAM).  So again you gain quite a bit from large
caches...

    Thorsten

____________________________________________________
Thorsten Froehlich, Duisburg, Germany
e-mail: tho### [at] trfde

Visit POV-Ray on the web: http://mac.povray.org

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> If you want to save money and time, give Linux a try. I compiled the
sources
> of POV-Ray with the Athlon optimisations of the gcc compiler and got
shorter
> render times than with my Windows version of POV-Ray.

yeah - the biggest boost in performance (bang for buck) will come from code,
not extra hardware

however, as with everything Linux, your mileage may vary - my pc idles with
20%+ cpu usage with Linux (any flavour)


--

Rick

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POV-Ray News & Resources - http://Povray.co.uk
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Thorsten Froehlich <tho### [at] trfde> wrote:
: However, it should be noted that even DDR-SDRAM still has a
: specific access time for the first access which isn't much better than the
: first access time of SDR-SDRAM (because decoding an address takes about the
: same in either type of RAM).  So again you gain quite a bit from large
: caches...

  On the other hand, when there's a cache miss, significant amount of time is
spent copying a portion of the RAM to the cache. If the RAM is faster, wouldn't
this copying be faster as well?

-- 
#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 -

Post a reply to this message

Rick [Kitty5] <ric### [at] kitty5com> wrote:
: however, as with everything Linux, your mileage may vary - my pc idles with
: 20%+ cpu usage with Linux (any flavour)

  Have you tried running at nice -20? (You need to be root for that, though.)

-- 
#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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