Joshua Johaneman wrote:
> Except, don't they use a Reduced instruction set? which is faster for some
> things and slower for others?

No, RISC is faster *ever* but eats up more memory.

My G3/233 can render SKYVASE.POV at 640*480 with antialiasing (the
classical povbench options) in 00:02:31 while a PII/233 in 00:03:18.

40% faster.

I noticed that Level II cache speeds up raytracing dramatically.

On my old 4400/200 (PowerPC 603e) I discovered that with 512k cache
it rendered twice as fast than without cache.

Obviously the bigger the cache, the faster the render (except, I think
if all the parsed object will fit in the cache, in this case I think
that an even larger cache won't help much).

I noticed that PentiumPro renders very fast and I think this is due to
his extremly fast 1:1 level II cache (running at the same processor
speed).

Just my opinion

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( Diego Krota   http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Way/2419 )
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Hi!

> My G3/233 can render SKYVASE.POV at 640*480 with antialiasing (the
> classical povbench options) in 00:02:31 while a PII/233 in 00:03:18.
>
> 40% faster.

Another interesting thing to look at is the environtment you're running. (I'm
gonna get flamed for this, I know...) On my machine (intel 200MMX blablabla),
running windows95 all priority to POV, skyvase.pov render in 4.43 and on the
same machine running Linux it renders in 4.03 (with normal priority) that's a 40
second decrease in rendering time. I haven't tested the speed in DOS but i will,
probably with the result that it's a lot faster than win95.

Anyway, this is just meant to say that CPU isn't everything and the environment
makes quite a big difference. But then again the CPU does make a difference...

//Hans

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Matthew Mc Clement wrote:
> 
> But more in line with this thread, I agree that photoshop is not the
> best app to compare, but there are several magazines that use it as a
> comparison. So what would be a good cross-platform benchmark? For raw
> processing speed, I guess the byte benchmarks are reasonable, anybody
> used this to compare the G3, PPC and PII?Pov might be another good
> option for FPU, but I know little about the mac architecture, and so I
> don't know what POV has been optimised for, or does each version have
> different optimization's for different platforms? But what I would love
> to see is a universal 3d benchmark, so we can see how our humble Pc's
> measure upto SGI Extreme's...;-)

Ultimately, there's NO good way to compare overall performance between two
different systems, unless you want to spend a month devising various specific
and real-world benchmarks.. and then the OS gets in the way.

Fortunately, by now we've probably seen that many Mac vs. Wintel comparisons,
and it's fairly safe to say that IN GENERAL Power Macs are significantly (but
not tremendously) faster than Pentiums.. say 20-50%.

> P.S. Does the mac have any good 3d accelerators?

Yes, but 3D acceleration won't speed up POV-Ray (or other raytracers), if
that's what you want it for. That'd be like getting a bunch of hungry
teenagers to help your food cook faster; it doesn't work that way.

On the other hand, the G4 machines should make excellent raytracers when they
come out; I don't think that AltiVec will help with all the floating math
(unfortunately), but they're supposed to have much better FPU than earlier chips...

-Xplo

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