If you use a ramdisk, you need to make sure that the scenes memory use is
low or it will swap to disk, the only real performance gain in using a ram
disk is that writing the image to disk is faster during render, but this
only happens for about 2ms every second - don't bother with a ramdisk.

the reason that SCSI is faster is because of virtual memory - where you
don't have enough memory for your scene, a disk is used instead. If you run
win95 version, windows needs to be running from SCSI to get the speed
boost, if you run dos version, you need to run povray from a scsi drive. I
don't know about linux (whether the swapping is performed by the OS and
whether you can choose the drive used for the swap file).

Be careful about upgrading RAM to more than 64Mb, I have heard (though I'm
not sure that it is right) that to access RAM addressed over 64Mb, RAM
swapping must occur, I'm a little surprised by this since in protected mode
(I think, or is it real mode - one emulates the old, dumb memory
addressing), 386+ can address upto 4Gb without problems. So it may be
prudent to keep you RAM to 64Mb or less unless you need more to avoid
swapping (you will need a very complex scene, or you will need to run the
windows version of povray).

PS. don't quote me on any of the last paragraph.

-- 
Tristan Wibberley

(Remove the '.NO_LUNCHEON_MEAT' from my
email address to reply.)

GrimDude <grimdude&nos### [at] swbellnet> wrote in article
<01bd1fdf$0c88c560$e5681cce@arkansasusa.com.arkansasusa.com>...
| I use an EIDE hard drive with the proprietary controller on the MB. At
7ns
| access time it is just as fast as SCSI (which I used to own). I got tired
| of buying devices that cost many times more, yet seem to burn up with an
| increasing frequency. It's probably not the devices fault (SCSI I mean),
| but an expense is an expense.
| 
| Put your money on fast RAM and CPUs.
| 
| Paul Hinds
| gri### [at] swbellnet
| 
|

Post a reply to this message