POV-Ray : Newsgroups : povray.general : Mac slow? Server Time
10 Aug 2024 07:19:05 EDT (-0400)
  Mac slow? (Message 1 to 6 of 6)  
From: Anton Sherwood
Subject: Mac slow?
Date: 24 Feb 2000 02:28:11
Message: <38B4DE89.8474C3DD@pobox.com>
I recently replaced my Mac clone (PPC, 180 MHz) with a Linux box (K7,
550 MHz).  I installed povray and found it surprisingly fast.  How
fast?  I tried a scene that I remembered as taking three hours, and it
was done in 8m 21s.

With a 3x difference in nominal CPU speed, why this 20x difference in
rendering?
Does the Mac compiler fail to use the math chip efficiently?  Is the
math chip just crap?

-- 
Anton Sherwood  *\\*  br0### [at] p0b0xcom  *\\*  http://www.jps.net/antons/


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From: Peter Popov
Subject: Re: Mac slow?
Date: 24 Feb 2000 05:14:22
Message: <zQK1OO0M6Yl0UiPm274nPPS6DjGD@4ax.com>
On Wed, 23 Feb 2000 23:32:25 -0800, Anton Sherwood <bro### [at] poboxcom>
wrote:

>I recently replaced my Mac clone (PPC, 180 MHz) with a Linux box (K7,
>550 MHz).  I installed povray and found it surprisingly fast.  How
>fast?  I tried a scene that I remembered as taking three hours, and it
>was done in 8m 21s.
>
>With a 3x difference in nominal CPU speed, why this 20x difference in
>rendering?
>Does the Mac compiler fail to use the math chip efficiently?  Is the
>math chip just crap?

The Athlon has a faster RAM bus, much more internal clock-speed cache,
three fully separate conveyours for RISC instructions and what-not.
Also, there's the (slight) overhead of a GUI that you're usually not
bound to see in Linux. Also, the Linux kernel 2.2.13 (maybe some
earlier do, too) makes good use of memory type range registers, and
the athlon has three (or four?) of those. Also, the Linux compile is a
truly native one (i.e. for your machine) and the Mac compile was
optimized for a more general audience.

MACs are good machines, true RISC and all. Maybe you should try
testing again in a more "laboratoty" environment?


Peter Popov
pet### [at] usanet
ICQ: 15002700


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From: Chris Huff
Subject: Re: Mac slow?
Date: 24 Feb 2000 05:39:01
Message: <chrishuff_99-1EB639.05402524022000@news.povray.org>
In article <38B4DE89.8474C3DD@pobox.com>, Anton Sherwood 
<bro### [at] poboxcom> wrote:

> I recently replaced my Mac clone (PPC, 180 MHz) with a Linux box (K7,
> 550 MHz).

Besides the things Peter Popov mentioned...
Which PPC? Was it a 601 or 603? I think those were quite slow at 
floating point calculations, at least when compared to more current 
ones...and what about the processor cache? Bus speed? Amount of RAM? 
There is a lot more to speed than just MHz.

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


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From: Thorsten Froehlich
Subject: Re: Mac slow?
Date: 24 Feb 2000 09:41:20
Message: <38b54310@news.povray.org>
In article <38B4DE89.8474C3DD@pobox.com> , Anton Sherwood <bro### [at] poboxcom>
wrote:

> I recently replaced my Mac clone (PPC, 180 MHz) with a Linux box (K7,
> 550 MHz).  I installed povray and found it surprisingly fast.  How
> fast?  I tried a scene that I remembered as taking three hours, and it
> was done in 8m 21s.
>
> With a 3x difference in nominal CPU speed, why this 20x difference in
> rendering?
> Does the Mac compiler fail to use the math chip efficiently?  Is the
> math chip just crap?

You had preview on when comparing, right?  Are you sure you had the exact
same setup (hard to get without INI files)?
See <http://mac.povray.org/help_info.html#why_slow> how to "tune" your Mac
to deliver optimal performance when running POV-Ray Mac 3.1g.r2.


      Thorsten


____________________________________________________
Thorsten Froehlich, Duisburg, Germany
e-mail: tho### [at] trfde

Visit POV-Ray on the web: http://mac.povray.org


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From: Anton Sherwood
Subject: Re: Mac slow?
Date: 13 Aug 2000 15:08:10
Message: <3996F3B9.7B62F3ED@pobox.com>
Thorsten Froehlich wrote:
> See <http://mac.povray.org/help_info.html#why_slow> how to "tune" your Mac
> to deliver optimal performance when running POV-Ray Mac 3.1g.r2.

It's not there.

-- 
Anton Sherwood  --  br0### [at] p0b0xcom  --  http://ogre.nu/


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From: Thorsten Froehlich
Subject: Re: Mac slow?
Date: 13 Aug 2000 17:08:31
Message: <39970e4f@news.povray.org>
In article <3996F3B9.7B62F3ED@pobox.com> , Anton Sherwood <bro### [at] poboxcom>
wrote:

> Thorsten Froehlich wrote:
>> See <http://mac.povray.org/help_info.html#why_slow> how to "tune" your Mac
>> to deliver optimal performance when running POV-Ray Mac 3.1g.r2.
>
> It's not there.

Please note that the message you replied to is several month old!

The Mac website has changed since then, and the new link is
<http://mac.povray.org/support/faq.html#why_slow>


      Thorsten


____________________________________________________
Thorsten Froehlich
e-mail: mac### [at] povrayorg

I am a member of the POV-Ray Team.
Visit POV-Ray on the web: http://mac.povray.org


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