"D. Stark" wrote:
> 
> How does this compare to the RAM use of running 2 instances of POV? 2 instances
> of POV seem a little wasteful, but at least a few megs of that ram is shared.
> My SMP box only has 128 right now.  : )

I just upgraded to 256 because my IRTC entry features a lot of
objects...

To be more precise, there is a little overhead as long as you do not use
radiosity. If you do, be aware that there are not 2, but 3 octrees,
because the master process builds its own one as part of the sharing
mechanism. So, except if you have several tens megabytes in your octree
(which is not very likely), you won't see a big difference.

The main overhead concerns rendering time, which is higher than what you
would get with an accurately split rendering across your processors. On
my latest IRTC entry, rendering speed with 2 processors was about 185%
of the speed with one processor. But OTOH you will not have to worry
about load balancing, PVM will do it for you.

-- 

      __  __ __  __  _
|  | /  \  /  / |_  /  |/
\/\/ \__/ /_ /_ |__ \_ |\

Post a reply to this message