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"jhu" <nomail@nomail> wrote:
> You could always use the Povray SDL. It's not that difficult. Also, you can pick
> up an old and cheap core2 or athlon ii computer that is much faster than the
> ppc970.
I _could,_ yeah, but as Jim says, I find it easier to work with some kind of
visual aid when designing scenes. Much simpler that way. I suppose I _could_ do
the modelling in Moray/Win and export to POV scenes to be rendered on the Mac,
but that seems unnecessarily awkward.
As far as the PPC970 goes, the benchmarks I've seen actually put my particular
G5 (2.5GHz, dual-core dual-CPU) about on par with a 3GHz Core 2 Duo, and while I
_could_ get a nicer PC system, I don't really have a need to, as this is more
than enough horsepower for my needs and I find x86 kind of gross under the hood
anyway.
Although I gather that I need to build POV-Ray 3.7 RC3 in order to have
multi-core support, so I suppose I ought to do that...
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Jim Henderson <nos### [at] nospam com> wrote:
> On Sat, 13 Aug 2011 02:07:39 -0400, jhu wrote:
>
> Well, it can be difficult if you don't have a good visual way of
> thinking. I have difficulty visualizing what I want to see on the screen
> without actually seeing it.
Wings is already mentioned, but have you tried Art of Illusion?
http://aoi.sourceforge.net
It's cross-platform (Java) and fairly easy to learn. It has subdivision and a
new (although limited) POV plugin. The forums are very helpful; have a look at
http://www.friendlyskies.net/aoiforum/
H
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Quod non fecerunt barbari, fecit commodorejohn :
> All I really want here is a simple modeller along the lines of Moray that I can
> use for hobby rendering, and that will build without a big fuss. Can anyone give
> me some suggestions?
>
http://sourceforge.net/apps/phpwebsite/yaprm/index.php
--
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"commodorejohn" <com### [at] gmailcom> wrote:
> "jhu" <nomail@nomail> wrote:
> > You could always use the Povray SDL. It's not that difficult. Also, you can pick
> > up an old and cheap core2 or athlon ii computer that is much faster than the
> > ppc970.
> I _could,_ yeah, but as Jim says, I find it easier to work with some kind of
> visual aid when designing scenes. Much simpler that way. I suppose I _could_ do
> the modelling in Moray/Win and export to POV scenes to be rendered on the Mac,
> but that seems unnecessarily awkward.
>
> As far as the PPC970 goes, the benchmarks I've seen actually put my particular
> G5 (2.5GHz, dual-core dual-CPU) about on par with a 3GHz Core 2 Duo, and while I
> _could_ get a nicer PC system, I don't really have a need to, as this is more
> than enough horsepower for my needs and I find x86 kind of gross under the hood
> anyway.
>
> Although I gather that I need to build POV-Ray 3.7 RC3 in order to have
> multi-core support, so I suppose I ought to do that...
PPC970 @ 2.5GHz faster than a 3 GHz core2? I find that hard to believe,
especially for Povray since core2 has a much more powerful FPU than the PPC970.
Have you done any Pov benchmarks?
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Found some old benchmark of a 1.8 GHz PPC 970 here:
http://news.povray.org/povray.macintosh/thread/%3C3f94a116$1@news.povray.org%3E/
POV Ray compiled with gcc3.3 as part of fink distribution (no
optimizations):
Parse Time: 6 seconds
Photon Time: 1 minute, 12 seconds
Trace Time: 43 minutes, 18 seconds
Total Time: 44 minutes, 36 seconds
POV Ray compiled with G5 optimizations in gcc3.3
(switches -mcpu=970 -mtune=970 -mpowerpc64 -mpowerpc-gpopt)
Parse Time: 5 seconds
Photon Time: 1 minute, 6 seconds
Trace Time: 46 minutes, 54 seconds
Total Time: 48 minutes, 5 seconds
POV Ray compiled with IBM's xlC V6.0 BETA compiler
(switches -qarch=ppc970 -qtune=ppc970 -qalign=natural -O3)
Parse Time: 6 seconds
Photon Time: 1 minute, 17 seconds
Trace Time: 43 minutes, 56 seconds
Total Time: 45 minutes, 19 seconds
For comparison, here's my Celeron 220 @ 1.2 GHz compiled with icc and the
fastest time I could get:
icc 11.1, -xSSSE3
Parse Time: 0 hours 0 minutes 1 seconds (1 seconds)
Photon Time: 0 hours 0 minutes 42 seconds (42 seconds)
Render Time: 0 hours 29 minutes 34 seconds (1774 seconds)
Total Time: 0 hours 30 minutes 17 seconds (1817 seconds)
Granted there are several caveats here including:
1) povray 3.5 (PPC 970 test) vs. povray 3.6 (Celeron 220 test)
2) Mac OS X 10.2 vs. Debian 6.0
3) gcc/ibm compiler vs. icc.
From my own tests, the speed difference between povray 3.5 and 3.6 is rather
negligible. However, povray is consistently, but slightly, slower (~3.7%) on Mac
OS X vs. Debian (tested on my dual-boot iBook with PPC 750 @ 700 MHz).
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"jhu" <nomail@nomail> wrote:
> PPC970 @ 2.5GHz faster than a 3 GHz core2? I find that hard to believe,
> especially for Povray since core2 has a much more powerful FPU than the PPC970.
> Have you done any Pov benchmarks?
Not _faster,_ just roughly on par with. They aren't my benchmarks, though,
that's just the general impression I get from looking at assorted results for
GeekBench (http://browse.geekbench.ca/) and some other assorted benchmarks.
(Note, though, that that's for the 2x dual-core DDR2 model. Older G5s,
single-core especially, seem to score a lot closer to a mid-range P4.)
I haven't done any tests with POV-Ray yet, I want to try getting 3.7 RC3 built
first so that it's actually using all four cores. (Though I suppose in a pinch I
could launch four separate copies rendering 1/4 of the viewport...nah.)
"jhu" <nomail@nomail> wrote:
> Granted there are several caveats here including:
> 1) povray 3.5 (PPC 970 test) vs. povray 3.6 (Celeron 220 test)
> 2) Mac OS X 10.2 vs. Debian 6.0
> 3) gcc/ibm compiler vs. icc.
>
> From my own tests, the speed difference between povray 3.5 and 3.6 is rather
> negligible. However, povray is consistently, but slightly, slower (~3.7%) on Mac
> OS X vs. Debian (tested on my dual-boot iBook with PPC 750 @ 700 MHz).
Hmm, interesting. Is it still true that POV-Ray doesn't support AltiVec? I
wonder how much of a performance impact that would have...
Just for the record, I'm not a "PPC is the best" fanatic, I just find x86 kind
of gross under the hood and since I can get something nice for cheap now that
all the Apple "ooh, shiny" cult have all moved on to the Intel models, I figure
this will meet my needs quite nicely ;)
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Am 20.08.2011 06:46, schrieb commodorejohn:
> Hmm, interesting. Is it still true that POV-Ray doesn't support AltiVec? I
> wonder how much of a performance impact that would have...
The question should be, "is it still true that AltiVec does not support
double-precision floating point?"
It apparently still does, so AltiVec gives no (significant) benefit for
POV-Ray. Color computations might be faster (because POV-Ray uses
single-precision floating point for those) provided the used compiler
can optimize for AltiVec.
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"commodorejohn" <com### [at] gmailcom> wrote:
> Not _faster,_ just roughly on par with. They aren't my benchmarks, though,
> that's just the general impression I get from looking at assorted results for
> GeekBench (http://browse.geekbench.ca/) and some other assorted benchmarks.
> (Note, though, that that's for the 2x dual-core DDR2 model. Older G5s,
> single-core especially, seem to score a lot closer to a mid-range P4.)
>
> I haven't done any tests with POV-Ray yet, I want to try getting 3.7 RC3 built
> first so that it's actually using all four cores. (Though I suppose in a pinch I
> could launch four separate copies rendering 1/4 of the viewport...nah.)
>
You can just test out single thread performance with pov 3.6. That'd be the
easiest thing to do now. I'm sure a bunch of us would like to see that.
> Hmm, interesting. Is it still true that POV-Ray doesn't support AltiVec? I
> wonder how much of a performance impact that would have...
Altivec only does 32-bit float, so not likely.
>
>
> Just for the record, I'm not a "PPC is the best" fanatic, I just find x86 kind
> of gross under the hood and since I can get something nice for cheap now that
> all the Apple "ooh, shiny" cult have all moved on to the Intel models, I figure
> this will meet my needs quite nicely ;)
Can't argue with getting something cheap. Although the 970 is a power hog by
comparison (one of the big reasons why Apple switched to Intel).
I had, at one point, considered getting an Itanium2 system from ebay since
they're so cheap now. Then I realized that I could get a few computers for
Povray usage for cheaper that use less energy overall and had greater processing
power in aggregate.
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"jhu" <nomail@nomail> wrote:
> You can just test out single thread performance with pov 3.6. That'd be the
> easiest thing to do now. I'm sure a bunch of us would like to see that.
Yeah, I suppose so. I'm on vacation at the moment, though - maybe next week :)
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On Wed, 10 Aug 2011 22:43:45 EDT
"commodorejohn" <com### [at] gmailcom> wrote:
> All I really want here is a simple modeller along the lines of Moray that I can
> use for hobby rendering, and that will build without a big fuss. Can anyone give
> me some suggestions?
Just for completeness, I have kpovmodeller running (with quite a few
limitations) with POVray 3.7. It needs some care to compile and make
stable, but it's fairly simple to use. It works for unfrequent users
like me...
John
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