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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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"jhu" <nomail@nomail> wrote:
> 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/
Well, stunningly enough for all the trouble I had with it the first time, 3.7RC3
compiled without a hitch now (GCC 4.4.5) and runs just fine. So, here's what I
got for povray --benchmark on my machine (dual-CPU dual-core PPC 970MP @ 2.5GHz,
4GB RAM, Debian Squeeze PPC64.)
Parse Time: 0 hours 0 minutes 1 seconds (1.407 seconds)
using 1 thread(s) with 1.403 CPU-seconds total
Photon Time: 0 hours 0 minutes 6 seconds (6.445 seconds)
using 7 thread(s) with 7.395 CPU-seconds total
Trace Time: 0 hours 12 minutes 1 seconds (721.406 seconds)
using 4 thread(s) with 2848.433 CPU-seconds total
Didn't give me an official total time, but that works out to 729.258 seconds
(~12 min 9 sec) or so. Not quite as good on a per-CPU-per-clock basis as that
1.8GHz G5 benchmark, but still not too bad!
(Certainly gave the cooling system a workout! Thank God for the big-bladed
lower-RPM fans in this thing, or it'dve been like a jet take-off in my computer
room!)
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