In article <chr### [at] netplexaussieorg> , 
Christopher James Huff <chr### [at] maccom>  wrote:

>> No, but under Mac OS X one has to give control to the system as frequently
>> as possible to prevent the spinning beachball cursor which effectively locks
>> the user out of the program.  So under mac OS X POV-ray 3.5 for Mac OS is
>> forced to be more friendly than under Mac OS 9.
>
> And I guess you probably can't fix this without making it Mac OS X
> only...

Yes and no.  With Mac OS 9.1 and later it is possible to create MP-services
threads (which are preemptive) that do file-io.  So it is not impossible to
make the render engine run in a preemptive thread on those Mac OS  versions.
Then, under Mac OS X while all the function calling restrictions still
apply, it would also run preemptively just like a Cocoa preemptive thread.
That way it should get absolutely all available CPU resources (of one CPU,
of course).

In fact, I have such an experimental version and it will run just fine on
one processor of the dual G4 and leave the GUI on the other processor.  So
the GUI is as responsive as without rendering, and the Mac (under Mac OS
that is) is fully usable.  Even better, this way one can run two instances
of POV-Ray to use both processors just like one can currently in the Windows
version.

However, this version is not ready for prime-time yet, and won't for another
few month.  It may (note that I say may *not* will) be ready when there will
be a POV-Ray 3.5.1 or whatever the maintenance releases will be called.

    Thorsten

____________________________________________________
Thorsten Froehlich, Duisburg, Germany
e-mail: tho### [at] trfde

Visit POV-Ray on the web: http://mac.povray.org

Post a reply to this message