In article <3a9981ee@news.povray.org>, "Ed Kaiser" 
<eka### [at] camdentdsnet> wrote:

> So, how does povray perform on a mac anyway?

Well, could you be more specific?
The images are the same, of course. As I understand it, the PowerPC 
processors used in modern Macs aren't as strong on the FPU side as some 
other processors, so a G3 Mac will render more slowly than an Athlon and 
probably a Pentium III, if all else is equal (which is, of course, not 
possible). I don't know how much slower, though...I'm pretty happy with 
my computers. (a 266MHz and a 350MHz G3 Power Mac)
I don't know about the new G4's, they've apparently improved the FPU 
performance with the latest version, along with the AltiVec (Velocity 
Engine) SIMD stuff (which won't help any current version of POV).

System performance while rendering? If I have POV set to hog the CPU, 
things get very sluggish on both my 266MHz G3 and my 350MHz G3 when 
running Mac OS 9. If I set it to normal or very light usage, there is 
barely any noticeable impact. I haven't done anything with the Carbon 
version of MacMegaPOV under OS X, so I don't know how much of a 
difference that makes for either rendering speed or system performance. 
However, you should be able to disable the GUI in OS X, to squeeze out 
every cycle of processor power.

In the "Classic" Mac OS (versions 9.1 and lower), the memory system has 
you specify the amount of memory to allocate for POV, and the virtual 
memory is not very good. OS X is a huge improvement in this area, 
programs can grab more memory as needed, and things should go a lot 
faster if they have to use virtual memory, so this is another factor if 
you often render memory-consuming scenes.

-- 
Christopher James Huff
Personal: chr### [at] maccom, http://homepage.mac.com/chrishuff/
TAG: chr### [at] tagpovrayorg, http://tag.povray.org/

<><

Post a reply to this message