Chambers <Ben### [at] gmailcom> wrote:
> So, 30 seconds to build the model & send it to the screen.  It still 
> seems ridiculously slow, but this *was* 1976 :)

  Well, one should consider that nowadays when they make computerized images
for movies, one single frame can take up to 48 hours to render, and even more,
so in fact it seems we have gone backwards... ;)

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote:
> Chambers <Ben### [at] gmailcom> wrote:
> > So, 30 seconds to build the model & send it to the screen.  It still
> > seems ridiculously slow, but this *was* 1976 :)
>
>   Well, one should consider that nowadays when they make computerized images
> for movies, one single frame can take up to 48 hours to render, and even more,
> so in fact it seems we have gone backwards... ;)

I don't believe that is true anymore.  2 hours is more common in renderfarms, or
so I heard...

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Chambers wrote:
> So, 30 seconds to build the model & send it to the screen.  It still 
> seems ridiculously slow, but this *was* 1976 :)

The Asteroids video game came out in 1979, so it's hard to believe that it 
really took that much more compute time, going from 2 minutes a frame to 
real-time, without something odd in the hardware going on.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Is God willing to prevent naglams, but unable?
     Then he is not omnipotent.
   Is he able, but not willing, to prevent naglams?
     Then he is malevolent.

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Darren New wrote:
> The Asteroids video game came out in 1979, so it's hard to believe that 
> it really took that much more compute time, going from 2 minutes a frame 
> to real-time, without something odd in the hardware going on.

Asteroids wasn't 3D.  Even slightly.

--
Tim Cook
http://empyrean.freesitespace.net

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nemesis <nam### [at] gmailcom> wrote:
> [-- text/plain, encoding 8bit, charset: iso-8859-1, 14 lines --]

> Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote:
> > Chambers <Ben### [at] gmailcom> wrote:
> > > So, 30 seconds to build the model & send it to the screen.  It still
> > > seems ridiculously slow, but this *was* 1976 :)
> >
> >   Well, one should consider that nowadays when they make computerized images
> > for movies, one single frame can take up to 48 hours to render, and even more,
> > so in fact it seems we have gone backwards... ;)

> I don't believe that is true anymore.  2 hours is more common in renderfarms, or
> so I heard...

  Are you talking about averages or about worst-case scenarios? If I remember
correctly, the slowest frames in the Transformers 2 movie took well over a
day to render. (I have read that one of the reasons why Devastator had so
little screen time is that it took so much time to render each frame that
they were simply hitting deadlines and computing budgets. The Devastator
model had like an order of magnitude more detail than any of the other
robots.)

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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nemesis wrote:
> Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote:
>>   Well, one should consider that nowadays when they make computerized images
>> for movies, one single frame can take up to 48 hours to render, and even more,
>> so in fact it seems we have gone backwards... ;)
> I don't believe that is true anymore.  2 hours is more common in renderfarms, or
> so I heard...

One of these things says 'up to', another says 'more common'.  We are 
referring to an outlier vs. modal statistic.  I don't see the conflict.

--
Tim Cook
http://empyrean.freesitespace.net

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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> Chambers wrote:
> > So, 30 seconds to build the model & send it to the screen.  It still 
> > seems ridiculously slow, but this *was* 1976 :)

> The Asteroids video game came out in 1979, so it's hard to believe that it 
> really took that much more compute time, going from 2 minutes a frame to 
> real-time, without something odd in the hardware going on.

  Maybe it's like I suggested, ie. with the lack of support for division in
hardware, they implemented a completely naive division algorithm in whatever
interpreted scripting language they were using. Multiply that by some hundreds
of vertex points, on a 70's computer, and 30 seconds could perhaps even be
plausible.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Warp wrote:
> they were simply hitting deadlines and computing budgets. 

I heard the same was true of the "gridwalkers" in Tron, which is why there's 
a whole level of the video game dedicated to about 10 seconds of screen time 
for that particular bad guy. :-)

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Is God willing to prevent naglams, but unable?
     Then he is not omnipotent.
   Is he able, but not willing, to prevent naglams?
     Then he is malevolent.

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Tim Cook wrote:
> Darren New wrote:
>> The Asteroids video game came out in 1979, so it's hard to believe 
>> that it really took that much more compute time, going from 2 minutes 
>> a frame to real-time, without something odd in the hardware going on.
> 
> Asteroids wasn't 3D.  Even slightly.

Yes. I'm saying the actual rendering and calculating hardware was probably 
already pretty fast, so there must have been something odd going on, right? 
It wasn't general slowness. It was slowness particular to this problem.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Is God willing to prevent naglams, but unable?
     Then he is not omnipotent.
   Is he able, but not willing, to prevent naglams?
     Then he is malevolent.

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Warp wrote:
>   Maybe it's like I suggested, ie. with the lack of support for division in
> hardware, they implemented a completely naive division algorithm in whatever
> interpreted scripting language they were using. 

Perfectly reasonable, to accomplish a one-time tasks when you're not on the 
critical path.  I know a guy[1] who worked on some of the graphics routines 
in Antz. The cost of human time has to be factored into the cost of the 
render time, so if you spend two days of programming time coming up with an 
algorithm that'll save 5 seconds of render on each of 2000 frames, you don't 
do it.

[1] He was an awful programmer, but clever. He got into exactly the field he 
should have been after he left where I was: a place where it's OK to come up 
with a half-decent solution that you run once for one particular input and 
then throw away. ;-)

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Is God willing to prevent naglams, but unable?
     Then he is not omnipotent.
   Is he able, but not willing, to prevent naglams?
     Then he is malevolent.

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