Ron Parker wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 28 Dec 1999 20:00:25 -0800, Ken <tyl### [at] pacbellnet> wrote:
> 
> >Benchmark testing generaly relies on the amount of time it takes
> >to render a given scene. If one were to design a scene that was
> >parsing intensive rather than render intensive how well would it
> >evaluate a systems performance ?
> 
> Well, you're evaluating a part of the process that typically takes a
> lot less time 

Sorry for cutting most of the message but this was the only thing I
think perhaps I disagree on. Most of the time rendering may take more
time than parsing but not in all cases. At the moment I'm rendering a
series of images where the parse time exceeds the render time. This, of
course is not very smart 8) In extreme cases it's better to do the heavy
calculations in an external program which will need only a fraction of
the time. Unfortunately this doesn't always work. I have noticed that
with the increasing power of my system I've concocted increasingly
complicated scenes which, even on a faster system, on average take
longer to render but even more so to parse (the more memory, the more
objects, the more parsing).

Just my two eurocents...

Remco

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In article <386a0a77@news.povray.org>, "omniVERSE" <inv### [at] aolcom> 
wrote:

> Wow, hey, large difference in the render time for those two.  I didn't 
> think
> there would be any significant change.  Must be a Mac thing.

My educated guess is that it is a compiler issue.

To get back to the original topic:
If you want to benchmark the parsing algorithm without benchmarking the 
disk, storing the scene file on a RAM disk should help.

--
Henri Sivonen
hen### [at] clinetfi
http://www.clinet.fi/~henris/

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I've rendered out to a ramdrive before.  There wasn't a difference, in
overall time anyway.

Bob

"Henri Sivonen" <hen### [at] clinetfi> wrote in message
news:henris-8B0D14.19312729121999@news.povray.org...
> In article <386a0a77@news.povray.org>, "omniVERSE" <inv### [at] aolcom>
> wrote:
>
> > Wow, hey, large difference in the render time for those two.  I didn't
> > think
> > there would be any significant change.  Must be a Mac thing.
>
> My educated guess is that it is a compiler issue.
>
> To get back to the original topic:
> If you want to benchmark the parsing algorithm without benchmarking the
> disk, storing the scene file on a RAM disk should help.
>
> --
> Henri Sivonen
> hen### [at] clinetfi
> http://www.clinet.fi/~henris/

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So, what you want to know is if there is a seperate parsing "engine" and
a rendering "engine"?  And can they be seperately optimized for
benchmarking purposes so that the parsing "engine" is platform
independant?

Or am I just gibbering?

Colin ;)



Ken originally wrote:
> 
> Benchmark testing generaly relies on the amount of time it takes
> to render a given scene. If one were to design a scene that was
> parsing intensive rather than render intensive how well would it
> evaluate a systems performance ?
> 


Ken then wrote:
>
> You guy's are still missing the point here. I give up.
>

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In article <386A0DF0.A9F73E70@gci.net>, "mr.art" <mr.### [at] gcinet> 
wrote:

> I always thought that the render was the most system intensive
> part of the process.

It usually is, but sometimes it is the other way around. For example, if 
your POV file includes particle simulations or tree/plant generation 
macros, the parse time can easily exceed the render time.

And just as the rendering can be benchmarked, so can the parsing. Doing 
tests on the parsing might reveal ways to speed it up or to write faster 
parsing scenes.

-- 
Chris Huff
e-mail: chr### [at] yahoocom
Web page: http://chrishuff.dhs.org/

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In article <386a0a77@news.povray.org>, "omniVERSE" <inv### [at] aolcom> 
wrote:

> Wow, hey, large difference in the render time for those two.  I didn't 
> think there would be any significant change.  Must be a Mac thing.

Well, there is a big difference in the chips. I have a G3, which is 
*very* fast at integer calculations, but not very fast at floating 
point. Parsing this scene probably uses mostly integer math.
Another thing is that the Mac version of POV-Ray has a memory cache 
feature which can really speed things up, especially in allocating 
memory(which is mainly what this scene is doing, allocating memory for 
those spheres).
And last but definitely not least, the compilers used different. The Mac 
version is compiled with CodeWarrior, I don't know about the Windows 
version.

-- 
Chris Huff
e-mail: chr### [at] yahoocom
Web page: http://chrishuff.dhs.org/

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In article <386a0e59@news.povray.org>, "omniVERSE" <inv### [at] aolcom> 
wrote:

>   The render time is obviously a video aspect to a machine, whereas the
> parse time is going to be the real guts of it, ie. the CPU and associated
> bus (and memory usage).

Nope, the video portions of the computer are not used in rendering. 
Rendering mostly tests the floating point performance of the 
microprocessor and the access speed of the RAM.
The only effect the video parts would have are in displaying the 
rendered image on the screen, and that is probably almost unnoticeable. 
And you can always turn the display off.


>   I would suggest leaving off the render part entirely for that matter, 
> at least by using the -d switch or Display=Off.  How about the file
> riting?  -f or Output_to_File=Off.

That doesn't turn the render off, just the display of the rendered 
image. The best way to minimize the render time interfering with the 
parse time would be to set a very small image size(like 4*4 pixels).

-- 
Chris Huff
e-mail: chr### [at] yahoocom
Web page: http://chrishuff.dhs.org/

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>   The question right now is not how fast you can render it.

-?-
That was entirely the parse time.

--
Homepage: http://www.faricy.net/~davidf/
___     ______________________________
 | \     |_       <dav### [at] faricynet>
 |_/avid |ontaine      <ICQ 55354965>

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Ken <tyl### [at] pacbellnet> wrote:
> Benchmark testing generaly relies on the amount of time it takes
> to render a given scene. If one were to design a scene that was
> parsing intensive rather than render intensive how well would it
> evaluate a systems performance ?
>
> For example I designed this scene to take exactly 30 sec. to parse
> on my system. There is a camera added simply to ensure that it was
> not pointed at any object and there are no lights added so that I
> rendered a black screen only. Render time at 640x480 with aa = 0.3
> was only 8 sec. which is inconsequential. A pigment was added to
> the object to ensure that no CPU cycles were spent on sending no
> pigment warnings messages to the message window for each object
> created by the scene code.
[snip]

I guess what you're mostly measuring with a test such as the one you posted
is the speed of memory allocation and filling (there aren't any complicated
transformations or other CPU-intensive parsing tasks).  This speed would be
affected by the physical speed of your RAM, the amount you have (and the
amount available under multi-tasking OS's), the drivers used to access it,
and probably the compiler used to make the POV-Ray executable.

All in all, benchmark tests of any kind can really only measure the speed of
tasks similar to what the test itself does, and even using POV-Ray there are
wildly different parsing tasks, eg. smoothing large heightfields or creating
subdivided bicubic patches, calling macros (particularly when they are
included from separate files), calculating bounding boxes and vista and
light buffers, etc.

Perhaps the best test of parsing and rendering is a scene which includes
many varied elements, giving something as close to a 'real-world' test as
possible?

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> Pentium III 500MHz, 32KB L1 Cache, 512KB L2 Cache, 256MB 100MHz SDRAM,
> 13.4GB ATA66 7200RPM HardDisk.
> Win98SE at 68% Resources.

Damn Bob, when did you get that sweet machine!?  If I'm ever pressed for
time on a render I'll know who to call. :)

-Mike

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