POV-Ray : Newsgroups : povray.unix : Interesting hardware to run Povray : Re: Interesting hardware to run Povray Server Time
1 Jul 2024 00:16:22 EDT (-0400)
  Re: Interesting hardware to run Povray  
From: Nicolas Calimet
Date: 13 Aug 2004 11:55:06
Message: <411ce45a$1@news.povray.org>
> I've got Povray running on a 
> Sony PS2 running Linux....doing the benchmark.pov file took more than 
> two weeks before it crashed.

	Ooops  :-)

	Considering how cheap is a relatively fast PC hardware nowadays,
I would strongly recommand to forget the PS2...  For instance, benchmark.ini
runs (succesfully) in about 35 minutes on an simple Athlon XP 2400+ or an
Intel P4 2.6 GHz.  Going to a 64-bit compile (on Athlon64/Opteron machine)
is also known to give an interesting speedup (compared to the 32-bit version
ran on the same machine) but that's a different budget.

	I never tried POV on a Cray and I won't.  Crays are interesting only
for highly parallelized/vectorized jobs (even that is changing).  POV-Ray is
not yet parallalized as of version 3.6 (unofficial MPI/PVM patches for 3.5
introduce some severe limitations or even problems).

	You should probably also forget about "older" architectures such as
SGI Mips or Sun Sparc.  The former were designed for CAD, the second IIRC
were most suited as servers.  None are good with floating-point intensive
applications.

	DEC (now Compaq now HP) could be worth a try; at least an EV6
machine was, back in 2000, much faster than a recent PC.  But it's far
too expensive IMO.

	Honestly, prefer a good PC or Mac for running POV.  It's not
by chance there is official support for these architectures.

	- NC


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