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From: Florian Brucker
Subject: POV-Ray speed guide
Date: 16 Nov 2004 14:56:05
Message: <419a5b55$1@news.povray.org>
I've put together a guide on how to improve rendering speed with 
POV-Ray. It is meant to be an introduction to the topic, a collection of 
links to already existing articles and a place to publish new tips and 
tricks:

http://torfbold.com/index.php?main=Graphics&sub=POV+Speed+Guide

I'm of course very interested in feedback from the community. So if 
you've got critcism, suggestions, spotted typos, etc. I'd like to know 
about it.

If you want to contribute a tip or trick to the guide, this is of course 
appreciated even more ;) Two-pass radiosity renders should be mentioned 
somewhere, for example... (I can't give tips on things I don't know 
nothing about ;)

Thanks for any tips, and a special "Thank you!" to the whole community 
for always being my main source of POV-Ray knowledge (I hope I can give 
something back to the community with my article).


Florian
-- 
camera{look_at-y*10location<8,-3,-8>*10}#local a=0;#while(a<999)sphere{
#local _=.01*a-4.99;#local p=a*.01-5;#local c=.01*a-4.995;<sin(p*pi)*5p
*10pow(p,5)*.01>sin(c*c*c*.1)+1pigment{rgb 3}}#local a=a+1;#end
/******** http://www.torfbold.com ******** http://www.imp.org ********/


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From: Thorsten Froehlich
Subject: Re: POV-Ray speed guide
Date: 16 Nov 2004 15:59:47
Message: <419a6a43@news.povray.org>
In article <419a5b55$1@news.povray.org> , Florian Brucker 
<tor### [at] torfboldcom>  wrote:

> I'm of course very interested in feedback from the community. So if
> you've got critcism, suggestions, spotted typos, etc. I'd like to know
> about it.

For now, four things:

* Great idea and good work!

* In the hardware section, don't make "graphic cards" bold, but "You don't
even need a graphic card to raytrace" because later on you mark bold what is
needed, and a reader only scanning the text could misunderstand that
paragraph.

* Question: On which platform did you measure the streams? I am wondering
because they are much faster than I would have expected.

* The thread about functions you link to contains some wrong information.
The author sin/cos evaluated constant expressions assuming that would make
the function faster.  This is not necessary, the function compiler is able
to evaluate constant (sub-)expressions automatically.  Currently (as of
3.6.1) the only exception to this are when the constant expression is a
user-defined function (thus what the user declared as "function { ... }") or
a functions that take more than one argument (except "pow", which is
optimised).  As such, the functions min, max, select and atan2 are not
optimised if they represent a constant expression.  However, it is likely
that in the future (with only a dot-dot version change, i.e. in 3.6.4 or so)
even these functions will be evaluated if they are a constant expression.
The only reason it is not currently done is lack of time to implement what
is needed to do it.

    Thorsten

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

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


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From: Christoph Hormann
Subject: Re: POV-Ray speed guide
Date: 16 Nov 2004 16:20:02
Message: <cndqpd$l6p$1@chho.imagico.de>
Florian Brucker wrote:
> I've put together a guide on how to improve rendering speed with 
> POV-Ray. It is meant to be an introduction to the topic, a collection of 
> links to already existing articles and a place to publish new tips and 
> tricks:
> 
> http://torfbold.com/index.php?main=Graphics&sub=POV+Speed+Guide
> 
> I'm of course very interested in feedback from the community. So if 
> you've got critcism, suggestions, spotted typos, etc. I'd like to know 
> about it.

Fairly elaborate but you stay somewhat vague in a lot of places - in the 
hardware section you say FPU, L1 cache, L2 cache, memory and bus speed 
are important but not to what extend and what this means for the reader 
- in fact the influence of memory/cache performance depends quite a lot 
on the scene.  These parts of your guide are probably of quite limited 
help for someone who tries to speed up his renders.

What you write about performance of scanline rendering vs. raytracing is 
  wrong in fact - like any statement that one of them is faster than the 
other.  They just scale differently.  Also it is not that much more 
research is going into scanline rendering algorithm improvements than 
into raytracing techniques but of course there is a real lot of money 
put into specialized hardware.

Still it gives a nice outline what aspects are actually influencing the 
render speed.

Christoph

-- 
POV-Ray tutorials, include files, Sim-POV,
HCR-Edit and more: http://www.tu-bs.de/~y0013390/
Last updated 23 Sep. 2004 _____./\/^>_*_<^\/\.______


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From: Warp
Subject: Re: POV-Ray speed guide
Date: 16 Nov 2004 16:57:35
Message: <419a77cf@news.povray.org>
The better standard unix tool for examining running processes is 'top',
not 'ps'. By default 'ps' will only show the processes run by the user
himself, not other users nor system processes, and 'ps' will not show
any other info about these processes, while 'top' by default shows all
the top processes running in the system sorted by default by the CPU
time they are taking, which is usually what the user is interested in
(this makes 'top' much more equivalent to the task manager of windows).

  Graphical interfaces usually do not take almost any CPU time at all
if you are not doing anything with them (unless you are using older
versions of MacOS X) so it's usually not necessary or useful to shut
them down for rendering. In order to better establish whether a
graphical interface slows down rendering in any considerable way
(when you are not doing anything but running POV-Ray with it) you
should *test* it, not just assume it.

  Wasn't the image called "First Strike at Pearl Harbour" (unless I have
completely missed a perl joke in that image...)?
  The link http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Workshop/9193/ doesn't seem
to work...

-- 
#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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From: Alain
Subject: Re: POV-Ray speed guide
Date: 16 Nov 2004 17:17:17
Message: <419a7c6d$1@news.povray.org>
Florian Brucker nous apporta ses lumieres ainsi en ce 2004-11-16 15:00... :

> I've put together a guide on how to improve rendering speed with 
> POV-Ray. It is meant to be an introduction to the topic, a collection 
> of links to already existing articles and a place to publish new tips 
> and tricks:
>
> http://torfbold.com/index.php?main=Graphics&sub=POV+Speed+Guide
>
> I'm of course very interested in feedback from the community. So if 
> you've got critcism, suggestions, spotted typos, etc. I'd like to know 
> about it.
>
> If you want to contribute a tip or trick to the guide, this is of 
> course appreciated even more ;) Two-pass radiosity renders should be 
> mentioned somewhere, for example... (I can't give tips on things I 
> don't know nothing about ;)
>
> Thanks for any tips, and a special "Thank you!" to the whole community 
> for always being my main source of POV-Ray knowledge (I hope I can 
> give something back to the community with my article).
>
>
> Florian

Nice looking page in Firefox, not so nice in msie.


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From: Ross
Subject: Re: POV-Ray speed guide
Date: 16 Nov 2004 18:07:25
Message: <419a882d$1@news.povray.org>
"Alain" <aze### [at] qwertygov> wrote in message
news:419a7c6d$1@news.povray.org...
> Florian Brucker nous apporta ses lumieres ainsi en ce 2004-11-16 15:00...
:
>
> > I've put together a guide on how to improve rendering speed with
> > POV-Ray. It is meant to be an introduction to the topic, a collection
> > of links to already existing articles and a place to publish new tips
> > and tricks:
> >
> > http://torfbold.com/index.php?main=Graphics&sub=POV+Speed+Guide
> >
> > I'm of course very interested in feedback from the community. So if
> > you've got critcism, suggestions, spotted typos, etc. I'd like to know
> > about it.
> >
> > If you want to contribute a tip or trick to the guide, this is of
> > course appreciated even more ;) Two-pass radiosity renders should be
> > mentioned somewhere, for example... (I can't give tips on things I
> > don't know nothing about ;)
> >
> > Thanks for any tips, and a special "Thank you!" to the whole community
> > for always being my main source of POV-Ray knowledge (I hope I can
> > give something back to the community with my article).
> >
> >
> > Florian
>
> Nice looking page in Firefox, not so nice in msie.

hehe. that was my first impression too. well, i had half of it anyway. "Nice
looking page, and even in Firefox!"

havn't looked in IE yet.


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From: Stefan Viljoen
Subject: Re: POV-Ray speed guide
Date: 17 Nov 2004 02:02:49
Message: <419af798@news.povray.org>
Florian Brucker wrote:

> I've put together a guide on how to improve rendering speed with
> POV-Ray. It is meant to be an introduction to the topic, a collection of
> links to already existing articles and a place to publish new tips and
> tricks:

Thanks Florian! I found it very informative - I don't know as much as the
other guys here about Pov and its internals, but I anyway found a few
interesting tips I didn't know about for speeding up my scenes.

-- 
Stefan Viljoen
Software Support Technician
Polar Design Solutions


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From: Stefan Viljoen
Subject: Re: POV-Ray speed guide
Date: 17 Nov 2004 02:03:58
Message: <419af7de@news.povray.org>
Alain wrote:

>> for always being my main source of POV-Ray knowledge (I hope I can
>> give something back to the community with my article).
>>
>>
>> Florian
> 
> Nice looking page in Firefox, not so nice in msie.

Looks pretty darn good in Mozilla too...

-- 
Stefan Viljoen
Software Support Technician
Polar Design Solutions


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From: Thorsten Froehlich
Subject: Re: POV-Ray speed guide
Date: 17 Nov 2004 04:10:36
Message: <419b158c$1@news.povray.org>
In article <419af7de@news.povray.org> , Stefan Viljoen <ryl### [at] polardcom> 
wrote:

>> Nice looking page in Firefox, not so nice in msie.
>
> Looks pretty darn good in Mozilla too...

That's the same thing...

    Thorsten

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

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


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From: Lance Birch
Subject: Re: POV-Ray speed guide
Date: 17 Nov 2004 04:32:48
Message: <419b1ac0@news.povray.org>
"Thorsten Froehlich" <tho### [at] trfde> wrote in message
news:419b158c$1@news.povray.org...
> In article <419af7de@news.povray.org> , Stefan Viljoen <ryl### [at] polardcom>
> wrote:
>
> >> Nice looking page in Firefox, not so nice in msie.
> >
> > Looks pretty darn good in Mozilla too...
>
> That's the same thing...

Actually, Mozilla Firefox isn't the same as the browser in the Mozilla
Suite.

But it uses the same layout engine so I guess for all intents and purposes
so far as rendering it is :)

</nitpick>

Lance.

thezone - thezone.firewave.com.au
thehandle - www.thehandle.com


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