AF <xxa### [at] notvalidxxnetdoorcom> wrote:
> POV docs are clear that the video card is not a part of the rendering
> speed equation.  From the responses here, depending on the GUI, a few
> milli-seconds or in a few cases perhaps a few seconds might be saved
> with a really fast video card.

  I'm not sure if that's so.
  POV-Ray for Windows will render to a pixel buffer in memory and then
this buffer is copied to the display, that is the video card. This copying
process is a really tiny amount compared to the rendering time, but it still
is something (even though it might be 0.0001% of the rendering time). However,
I don't think it's the speed of the video card which affects this copying
speed, but the speed of the AGP bus (or PCI bus if you happen to have such
an old video card).
  A superfast videocard is superfast when rendering triangles (which
coordinates and other info are *already* in the card's memory). This is
the so-called fill-rate. However, the video card can't affect the speed of
reading data from memory to the video card because it's the AGP bus speed
which limits it.

  (Btw, AFAIK the fastest way of copying data from memory to the screen
is using a frame buffer eg. using DirectDraw. OTOH I don't think POV-Ray
would benefit from DirectDraw support at all.)

-- 
#macro M(A,N,D,L)plane{-z,-9pigment{mandel L*9translate N color_map{[0rgb x]
[1rgb 9]}scale<D,D*3D>*1e3}rotate y*A*8}#end M(-3<1.206434.28623>70,7)M(
-1<.7438.1795>1,20)M(1<.77595.13699>30,20)M(3<.75923.07145>80,99)// - Warp -

Post a reply to this message