Thomas Willhalm wrote:

> Are you sure? The light has a speed of 300.000 km per second. So a signal
> with the speed of light travels in one cycle of such a processor
> 3*10^8 / 7.794*10^11 m which makes approximately 0.38 mm. If you assume
> that a signal should be able to traverse a processor in one cycle, the
> whole processor must be smaller than 0.38 mm.

Processors can do more and more per cycle as they evolve, too. So you wouldn't
actually need an 800Ghz chip.

--
David Fontaine     <dav### [at] faricynet>     ICQ 55354965
Please visit my website: http://www.faricy.net/~davidf/

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---Maybe the newest release of Myst- realMYST?
This could be considered a realtime raytraced world?
---
"Abe Heckenbach" <abe### [at] vrmlk12laus> wrote in message
news:3995A27D.570FDB04@vrml.k12.la.us...
> Sorry for this resend, but I didn't want it to get hidden under,
> "POV-Ray 3.1 to other file format.." thread.
>
> Simon> thanx, but the reason I want to use ray tracing is for the
> realisium, if virtual reality mean triing to trick the participant into
> believing he is in a different env., then ray tracing just seems
> right(since it models light rays and all),  Also I realise that
> computers are just not fast enough today, but they will be in the maybe
> not so distance future(Intel's P4, to be released this year, will be
> 1.5GHz+). Plus you can also make dedicated hardware, and software
> improvments. But hey, thanx anyways, I will read up more on openGL.
>
>
> ///////////////////////////////////////////
>
> Hey all,
>
> what is up?? My name is Abe Heckenbach, and I am a newbie to these
> newsgroups.
> I have only recently(past 3 months) gotten into ray tracing, and I think
> is is
> awesome(Who doesn't??). I am particularly interested in real-time ray
> tracing
> for the purpose of virtual reality.  Seems impossible... I know, but
> maybe its
> not, hardware is getting faster every day, and I'm sure there are
> software
> speed-ups that haven't been figured out yet(in fact I have a few ideas
> myself!)
>
> I'm interested in joining the POV-team to discuss ray tracing
> techniques, and
> help develop povray(I'm kinda new the C programming also, but I catch on
> quick,
> actually my first C program was a ray tracer to test one of my ideas,
> but I
> have been programming other languages for years, like java(and before
> that
> perl,basic,unix shell scripts,ect.))
>
> I would like to start a group, website and corresponding newsgroup, to
> discuss
> virtual reality, (everything necessary to a finished VRE Setup(hardware
> and
> software requirements), but completely from a theoretical point of view)
> If anyone is willing to host something like that let me know. If anyone
> is
> interested in any of this let me know, I would like to discuss it with
> people).
>
> Later,
>     Abe H.
>     abe### [at] vrmlk12laus

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Simon Lemieux wrote:
> 
> The eye perceive about 30 frames per second...  which means you would have to
> render every frame in 1/30 seconds...  that is if you divide the speed of my
> computer (433) for let say a 1 second render of povray by (1/30) you get the
> computer of your dream and it's probably not a Pentium since it should have
> 12990Mhz!!! (<currentSpee>/(1/<fps>)) = (433/(1/30)) = 12990Mhz!

MHz is hardly the only thing affecting render speed. Other important factors
are, for example, increased parallelism and faster memory subsytems.
A typical 600 MHz PIII system is far in excess of 600 times faster than a
typical 1 MHz XT system.

-- 
Margus Ramst

Personal e-mail: mar### [at] peakeduee
TAG (Team Assistance Group) e-mail: mar### [at] tagpovrayorg

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> ---Maybe the newest release of Myst- realMYST?
> This could be considered a realtime raytraced world?

I've not seen MYST but you might have? Do you need a 3dfx to play it? If so, it
uses OpenGL... can also use raytracing for rendering new textures and then show
them with OpenGL.. I don't know....  but I'm sure it's not a pure raytracer
behind that...

IMHO,
  Simon

-- 
+-------------------------+----------------------------------+
| Simon Lemieux           |         http://connect.to/666Mhz |
| lem### [at] yahoocom  | POV-Ray, OpenGL, C++ and more... |
+-------------------------+----------------------------------+

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hey all,

 I just got home from the 1st day of the geek fest(aka linux_expo), and
I have to say it was damn cool to see a compaq beowolf cluster, running
pov-ray at about 4 secs. a frame. ah yes.. the future is near my
friends... 

BUT the really interesting thing is that the CPU meters usually didn't
reach top speed.. anyone  know why??

if your interested, i believe it was 16 nodes, each running at
433Mhz.     linuX cool!

Abe
abe### [at] vrmlk12laus

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Abe Heckenbach wrote:
> 
> hey all,
> 
>  I just got home from the 1st day of the geek fest(aka linux_expo), and
> I have to say it was damn cool to see a compaq beowolf cluster, running
> pov-ray at about 4 secs. a frame. ah yes.. the future is near my
> friends...
> 
> BUT the really interesting thing is that the CPU meters usually didn't
> reach top speed.. anyone  know why??
> 

5% of the system recources are reserved for root. This for memory,
harddrives, CPU, anything. When I'm running povray I cannot give it more
then 95% of my CPU, unless I'm running it as root, but that's evil.

Remco Poelstra

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David Fontaine wrote:
> 
> Thomas Willhalm wrote:
> 
> > Are you sure? The light has a speed of 300.000 km per second. So a signal
> > with the speed of light travels in one cycle of such a processor
> > 3*10^8 / 7.794*10^11 m which makes approximately 0.38 mm. If you assume
> > that a signal should be able to traverse a processor in one cycle, the
> > whole processor must be smaller than 0.38 mm.
> 
> Processors can do more and more per cycle as they evolve, too. So you wouldn't
> actually need an 800Ghz chip.

	All the years of improvement and finally the 100MHz buss appeared, up
from 75. The new 2GHz from Intell will include a 400 MHz buss chipset.
So we get a cylindrical buss like a Cray ... 

	Maybe I am old fashioned but I've always had this idea the CPU and buss
should be the same speed. Fetch ahead is an amusing but uninteresting
hack. 

	But at 2 GHz just what possible reason is there for hardware cards? I
think I can spare 100 Mcycles to emulate them. 

	So I have this 3x3 inch card with a couple gigs of RAM, the CPU and a
couple USB ports. The USB port feed the conversion cards to video,
serial, parallel, keyboard, rat and such. This card plugs into my 100
Gig HD. Most data paths are less than one inch. The longest is from the
CPU to the R/W head on the HD. 

	If I am making my point correctly, we can give up a little of this new
processor speed in exchange for throwing away the buss and all the cards
that now sit on it. 

	The new USB standard is over 400 Mbs. 

-- 
Girls vote for male candidates for their looks.  
Men, Get out and vote.
	-- The Iron Webmaster, 35

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In article <39AA1B46.2138F7D9@ij.net>, matt giwer <jul### [at] ijnet> 
wrote:

> 	So I have this 3x3 inch card with a couple gigs of RAM, the CPU and a
> couple USB ports. The USB port feed the conversion cards to video,
> serial, parallel, keyboard, rat and such. This card plugs into my 100
> Gig HD. Most data paths are less than one inch. The longest is from the
> CPU to the R/W head on the HD. 
...
> 	The new USB standard is over 400 Mbs.

I think you would be better off with Firewire for the high-bandwidth 
applications like video, and USB for lower bandwidth applications like 
keyboard, mouse, and audio...Firewire already supports 400Mbs and will 
support more in the future, and has many peripherals available for it, 
like cameras, hard drives, etc.

-- 
Christopher James Huff
chr### [at] maccom, http://homepage.mac.com/chrishuff/

<><

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