Here's the news:

Radiosity is back to 3.6 speed! But the code is much prettier now.

The speed has actually shifted a good deal: While most of the scenes I use for
benchmarking will render at about the same time, a few will now render in just
50& of the CPU time (in one case even just 25%) - while a few others will take
as much as 300%.

At the bottom line, however, radiosity seems to have sped up a bit, now taking
about 90% of the CPU time required with 3.6.

One single scene has suffered in quality. However, as it has also gained a lot
in speed, I expect re-investing the gained time in higher quality settings will
bring that scene back to old quality as well.

So all radiosity enthusiasts out there, stay tuned for beta.33!

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Great, I'am eager fot it ;-). But I have strong feeling, that theese 
300% slower scenes are my test scenes with meshes ... Right?

Vaclav

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"clipka" <nomail@nomail> wrote:
> Radiosity is back to 3.6 speed! But the code is much prettier now.
>
> So all radiosity enthusiasts out there, stay tuned for beta.33!

This is great news; I'm sure everyone appreciates the work you've put into this!
The radiosity issues have been one of the things holding me back from using 3.7
frequently. I guess a linux build is too much to hope...? Well, I can always
build it myself if need be.

:-)

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Vaclav Cermak <dis### [at] disnelcom> wrote:
> Great, I'am eager fot it ;-). But I have strong feeling, that theese
> 300% slower scenes are my test scenes with meshes ... Right?

Well, yes and no.

The bad news is that yes, the 300% scene (+200% of original CPU time) is one of
yours :P

The good news is that no, actually all your *original* scenes happen to be
*boosted* in speed, ranging from a "lousy" -10% (rad_test04) to a friggin' -75%
(rad_test03) difference in CPU time (as compared to MegaPOV 1.2.1, which is the
best-optimized version of POV 3.6 I have available for my AMD64 Linux machine).

For some yet unexplained freakish reason, it's just the experimental versions
you produced later that still suffer compared to 3.6: A moderate +20% for the
flat-mesh version of rad_test04, and those nasty +200% for the recursion depth
1 variant.

(Note that I wasn't able to test your rad_test01 scene.)

The only other scenes that suffered noticeably are the "patio-radio" sample
scene using radiosity settings variant #4 (+25%), the "rad_def_test" sample
scene using OutdoorLQ settings (+10%, but that's just about 1 second), the
"radiosity" sample scene using settings variant #4 (+15%), and one of my own
scenes with a very pathological geometry (some people may recall that scene
with the almost-but-not-quite closed door; +150%; doesn't render properly
anyway, regardless of version).

Ah, yes, and the "balcony" sample scene suffers +20%, and an occasional segfault
for some reason still not fully understood.


Note that we're talking about CPU time here; on a QuadCore system running full
throttle, SMP turns even the worst of these cases into winners when it comes to
wall clock time.


BTW, thanks for providing your scenes. You may like to hear that they proved a
particularly valuable resource for radiosity testing and tuning - not only as a
speed benchmark, but also for comparison of quality, as the scenes exhibited
stong artifact responses to certain tweaking, revealing severe issues with
those settings I would not have been able to see otherwise.

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> This is great news; I'm sure everyone appreciates the work you've put into this!
> The radiosity issues have been one of the things holding me back from using 3.7
> frequently.

   Same feeling here...

 > I guess a linux build is too much to hope...? Well, I can always
 > build it myself if need be.

   I verified that new betas run smoothly with Wine, both the installer and 
the program. I did some quick tests with several scenes of mine, and it 
worked as expected (it even used all the threads available). And being a 
limited time beta, the Wine route seems more practical than expending hours 
trying to build it yourself ,each time a new beta comes out (at least for me).

--
Jaime

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Jaime Vives Piqueres <jai### [at] ignoranciaorg> wrote:
> > This is great news; I'm sure everyone appreciates the work you've put into this!
> > The radiosity issues have been one of the things holding me back from using 3.7
> > frequently.
>
>    Same feeling here...

Well, there's still a caveat. I'll post about it in bugreports in a few minutes.

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Excellent! Hurrah! Thanks for all that good work!

Thomas

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