7000 objects per 16MB, eh?

on my drive to work i pass this wooded valley.  the other day
the sun was just coming up and a light fog hung down low
exposing only the tree tops.  i thought to myself, "i could do
that."  there are several nice include files for trees, but when
you tack all the leaves on it, building an entire woods with
maybe 100 or 200 trees is gonna drive the object count thru
the ceiling.

i'm ordering a new 1.2GHz athlon motherboard and 1.5GB of
memory today.  gonna come to around $270 total.

thank you for the information.

miker


"Mike Williams" <mik### [at] nospamplease> wrote in message
news:AW6### [at] econymdemoncouk...
> Wasn't it MR who wrote:
> >hello,
> >
> >i know that pov-ray can be a memory hog when it renders.  what
> >i've heard is that if the memory it needs to do a render is exceeded,
> >the render will crash.
> >
> >whats the deal on this?  there's such a thing as "virtual" memory,
> >isn't there, where the app spools out to the hard drive for memory.
> >i know that processing slows to a crawl because this is so time-
> >consuming, but i got the impression from the post i read that pov-
> >ray won't even go the "virtual" memory route.
> >
> >by the way... i'm talking windows here.  i believe that 98, ME, NT,
> >ad nauseum, all do the virtual mem thingie, although i won't swear
> >to it.
>
> No, POV doesn't crash when virtual memory starts shuffling. However, the
> VM that's used by Windows is extremely inefficient at handling the sort
> of memory accesses that POV needs. I guess that Windows expects programs
> to process large chunks of memory in roughly serial fashion, so it tends
> to swap fairly large chunks of memory. POV's memory accesses tend to
> flit around its memory space rather less predictably - it looks at a few
> bytes here and a few bytes there, and that tends to mean that when it
> gets to the next pixel the relevant memory page has been shuffled out to
> disk. So each pixel ends up needing several disk accesses, and rendering
> speeds suddenly fall through the floor.
>
> POV can be a memory hog if you write your scenes in memory consumptive
> ways. It's often possible to rewrite complex scenes in memory efficient
> ways. (It's mainly the complexity of the scene description that requires
> lots of memory, the size of the output image doesn't make much
> difference). Expect to have to limit yourself to about 7000 individual
> objects for every 16Mb of available memory on your machine. If that's
> not enough yo can make POV less memory hungry by switching off the light
> buffers and vista buffers.
>
> --
> Mike Williams
> Gentleman of Leisure

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