In article <web.3ef882511b6e269c7f877a1c0@news.povray.org>,
 "hamburg" <ham### [at] fasharvardedu> wrote:

> Yeah.  Although if you read the fine print in the veritest pdf, it becomes
> clear that they rather lied about some of that.  Used lousy compilers for
> the competition, disabled their hyperthreading, etc.  Used a fast but
> memory-inefficient malloc library for their own tests.  Used compiler flags
> that aren't useful in realworld apps.  If you compare to, say, Dell's
> benchmarks of their own systems (which are probably similarly deceptive),
> Apple's are competitive but not the best.

They used the same compiler on both, GCC 3.3, a compiler that actually 
has a reputation for optimizing much better for x86 based architectures. 
They didn't weight the tests as highly in Intel's favor as they could 
have, that certainly doesn't mean they were deceptive. And they did not 
"lie", they said exactly what they did. For most people running a Linux 
or Unix system on the PC and Mac OS X on the Mac, these results are very 
close to what they will see.


> Also remember that POV is single threaded, so you won't benefit from
> multiple processors.  It is very difficult to multithread an application
> like POV, so it's unlikely to happen soon.  There existed a multithreaded
> version out there somewhere, but AFAIK it's not up-to-date (Thorsten would
> know).

You're a little off here...POV would benefit a little, since it could 
have an entire processor to itself, and system would have plenty left 
over for user interaction or other tasks. And if you're working on an 
animation or running multiple renders, having each instance of POV 
restricted to a single processor is much less of a problem..


> Enough of the bad news... It's possible that the Altivec SIMD unit does make
> the G5 the fastest desktop for some applications (Photoshop, codebreaking,
> FFT).  IIRC the G4-optimized version of POV uses Altivec, which would help
> in the G5 code too. 

Altivec could help with color calculations and some shape stuff. It 
would take some modifications to POV to get maximum benefit from it, but 
it could still help.


> And render speeds would benefit immensely from the
> increased memory bandwidth in the G5.

Yes...I'm guessing things like high-res meshes, photon mapping, and 
radiosity probably stress memory bandwidth pretty heavily.

-- 
Christopher James Huff <cja### [at] earthlinknet>
http://home.earthlink.net/~cjameshuff/
POV-Ray TAG: chr### [at] tagpovrayorg
http://tag.povray.org/

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