[William D. Hayden <wdh### [at] computeknet>]
| And a commercial, native compiler is even faster.  GCC is a known
| performance dog, but then it never claimed to produce fast code. 

True. That's the price for being multiplatform I suppose. 

| platforms.  I ALWAYS compile POV-Ray when I get it for my Solaris box. 
| I noticed a 20-30% speed increase over their GCC compiled release.

Impressive. SUN makes the best platform for POV-Ray use, at least
that's my experience. IRIX boxes are strangely slow and can easilly be
beat by an INTEL at the same MHz.
I'd love to see a POV-Ray version with K6-2 3DNOW support. It should
really fly.

| Of course for Windows, I think they use Watcom, one of the better X86
| compilers.  If your comparing the Windows version versus a command line
| version, merly get Windows out of the way will help tremendously. 

Actually, I compared the DOS protected mode-version to the one I
compiled. An unfair advantage to GCC, I know, but the dos-version
actually outperforms the Win95 version from the POV-Team. I've never
cared for the editor that goes with it. I use Emacs for my
scene-editor, and now that I have the unix-command line version I can
work in the same way no matter what platform I'm on.

| If you want to speed it up even more, pick up a Borland or Watcom compiler
| and recompile it again.  

I'm considering it.

-- 

At the top of the food chain.

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Actually I see the same thing.  I run two compiles for AlphaNT.  A port of
the Unix command-line version of 3.02 and my compile of POV-Win 3.01.  The
command-line version runs in about 25% less time than POV-Win.  On the same
system and both under Windows NT 4.0 SP3.

Mark Arrasmith

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Well before you start to argue about speed make sure you can even compare.

Copy SkyVase.pov to a temporary directory.  Create a file called skyvase.ini
and put the following in it . . .


-i SkyVase.pov
+v1
-d
+ft
-x
+a0.300
+r3
-q9
-w640
-h480
-mv2.0
-b1000


This is the official speed test.  Run it and then post your times.

Mark


>[yan### [at] pacbellnet]
>| Hmmm... I have a W95 K6/233 32MB system.
>| skyvase.pov 640x400 AA 0.2 took it 6m 17s with the v3.02 watcom  .exe
file.
>| At "no AA" it took 3m 49s
>
>Funny. I have a Pentium II 233, 64MB System. This is the part where I
>lecture you about the K6's FPU performance, but I won't. :)
>

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"Mark Arrasmith" <arr### [at] mathtwsuedu> wrote:

>Actually I see the same thing.  I run two compiles for AlphaNT.  A port of
>the Unix command-line version of 3.02 and my compile of POV-Win 3.01.  The
>command-line version runs in about 25% less time than POV-Win.  On the same
>system and both under Windows NT 4.0 SP3.

Did you set the render priority correctly ? And were any other apps running ?
Was display on ? All of these things affect speed under Windows. Check in the
help file.

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On Mon, 15 Jun 1998 22:10:03 -0500, "William D. Hayden"
<wdh### [at] computeknet> wrote:

>Of course for Windows, I think they use Watcom, one of the better X86
>compilers.  If your comparing the Windows version versus a command line
>version, merly get Windows out of the way will help tremendously.  If
>you want to speed it up even more, pick up a Borland or Watcom compiler
>and recompile it again.  A bare bones version of each is available for
>under $100 US.  Pricey, for some, cheap for the guy doing "a 5000-frame
>animation".

Surprise!  I compiled POVRay for Windows with MS VC++ 5.0 SP3 today,
from the unmodified 3.01 sources, and it beat my official 3.02 by 10%
on skyvase, in two different resolutions.  The official benchmark
resolution took 193 seconds on the official build, and 174 on my
build, both running on a PII-233 with 64MB of memory and NT 5 Preview
Beta 1.

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>Did you set the render priority correctly ?
Yes

>And were any other apps running ?
No

>Was display on ?
No

>All of these things affect speed under Windows.
I know.

The command line compile was from someone else (using VC++ Risc Edition).
The POV-Win compile was mine (again with VC++ Risc Edition).  The problem
might be with my settings on the compiler more than anything else.  I'll
tinker with that alittle.

Mark

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Guess this shows the K6 really is crap.....

200mmx 128meg = same settings for skyvase = 3 min 41 secs
p2-400 256meg =   "      "                = 1 min even.


yan### [at] pacbellnet wrote:
> 
> Hmmm... I have a W95 K6/233 32MB system.
> skyvase.pov 640x400 AA 0.2 took it 6m 17s with the v3.02 watcom  .exe file.
> At "no AA" it took 3m 49s


-- 
Lets make a better world - kill a politician today!!
Politics or religion = corruption and true evil.
Believe 1% of what you see or hear.
The laws that politicians make are mostly bad laws,
  we'd do far better without them - the politicians and their laws.

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>might be with my settings on the compiler more than anything else.  I'll
>tinker with that alittle.

Ok. The Windows version will always be slower than the DOS version (that's just
a fact of life of running it under a multitasking, graphical OS) but the
difference ought not to be as large as the 25% you saw.

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I got 4 minutes and 20 seconds.

Machine:

AMD K6 233, 64 MB RAM

pvengine.exe:

compiled using BC++5.0 for Pentium Pro (as per AMDs instructions), all
optimizations on.

BIOS write cache enabled via enwa.exe.

[also see below]

Jon

Mark Arrasmith wrote:
> 
> Well before you start to argue about speed make sure you can even compare.
> 
> This is the official speed test.  Run it and then post your times.
> 

> >Funny. I have a Pentium II 233, 64MB System. This is the part where I
> >lecture you about the K6's FPU performance, but I won't. :)
> >

And when I built my K6 system several months ago, that's when I'd have
lectured about the price difference between a K6 and a PII. ;-)

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In article <358741C0.FFF99352@mailexcite.com>,
Morpheus Dreamlord <mor### [at] mailexcitecom> wrote:
>Guess this shows the K6 really is crap.....
>
>200mmx 128meg = same settings for skyvase = 3 min 41 secs
>p2-400 256meg =   "      "                = 1 min even.

Sun Ultra II, 512 meg - 2:10

        Mike

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