s wrote:

> Thanx - so it would be better to get a decent 4Mb card and do the 16 Million
> color thing :) ?

  If your card doesn't support 16 M colors now you should see a
great improvement. 4 meg cards are good as far as I am concerned.
The only reason you might consider going for a card with more
memory and active 3d support is if you plan on viewing fast gaming
videos and large mpg movies.
    The card you mentioned earlier I believe has pretty good specs
for live/movie quality video.
    If your really going to get into raytracing for a while buy
the lesser card and invest the balance of your money on either
a faster CPU or add to your system memory.
    If you try to render some of the more memory intensive
scenes, and your system doesn't have enough memory, you
can slow down the render time quite a bit, because the system
spend time writing out to your hard drive.
    Most people are now recommending 64 megs of memory
for raytracing and personally I think 128 megs is a lot more
comfortable.
    Having said that I will probably get flamed by the people
that are still running on 16 meg systems.
   Oh well !

Ken Tyler

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Another VFAQ?

-- 
                                                           - Warp. -

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Yes.

K.

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Definitely! :-)

J.

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s wrote:
> 
> If l used one of the newer 3-D video cards - Creative Lab's
> Voodoo for instance would this significantly improve rendering time and/or
> quality ? I realise that these cards are manufactured for gaming but could
> they work or is it worth buying a decent PCI SVGA card ?
> 
> Shaun.

Won't do you much of any good. Most 3D accelerator cards simply
manipulate pre-rendered textures at high speed. They can blend, twist,
warp and mutilate the images sent to them, but they can't do any of the
computational expensive raytracing that povray does. Entirely difference
thing.

Best thing to do (for povray) is probably get a good cheap matrox
millennium or like-grade 2d card.

s wrote:
> 
> If l used one of the newer 3-D video cards - Creative Lab's
> Voodoo for instance would this significantly improve rendering time and/or
> quality ? I realise that these cards are manufactured for gaming but could
> they work or is it worth buying a decent PCI SVGA card ?
> 
> Shaun.



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http://www.public.usit.net/lsellers/ & http://www.fourthfoundation.com
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curiously -- thick with a sumerian accent.)

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I realize this message is very old, and this poor consumer has probably
wasted a lot of money on a Voodoo card already, but I can't help but wonder
why no one thought of the fact:
A Voodoo/VoodooII card can not run in a window! This means it will have
absolutely NO affect on POV-Ray, which is why it works only for games, it
will not speed up, make prettier or otherwise, in any way, shape or form
help you to buy a voodoo card, invest in another 8M card (I'm selling a
FireGL Pro 1000 8M AGP :) but don't go for the Voodoo card, unless you want
the games.

- Tim -

--
Ross: It's the most beautiful, natural thing in the world.
Joey: Yeah, we know, but there's a baby sucking on it!

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Timothy Farley <loc### [at] commkeynet> wrote:
: A Voodoo/VoodooII card can not run in a window! This means it will have
: absolutely NO affect on POV-Ray

  A 3D-card will have absolutely no affect on povray no matter if it can
or cannot run in a window. Povray is not a scanline renderer, but a
raytracer. You can't raytrace with a 3D-card.

-- 
main(i){char*_="BdsyFBThhHFBThhHFRz]NFTITQF|DJIFHQhhF";while(i=
*_++)for(;i>1;printf("%s",i-70?i&1?"[]":" ":(i=0,"\n")),i/=2);} /*- Warp. -*/

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The only time a Voodoo2 or any other '3D accelerator" card would come in handy
would be when using a modeller that used Glide or OpenGL previews.  Those would
update faster and probably show textures more clearly.  I suppose if you were
composing in VRML, a 3D card would come in handy for navigating around the
scene in real-time (or as close as you can get on a 56K connection... what, you
don't have a T1 to your house?  Bummer... )

If you want to 'speed up' rendering, get more RAM, faster and larger disks, and
a faster processor (or processors!!); t'would also help to use an OS that
doesn't do a lot of CPU-hogging.

Timothy Farley wrote:

> I realize this message is very old, and this poor consumer has probably
> wasted a lot of money on a Voodoo card already, but I can't help but wonder
> why no one thought of the fact:
> A Voodoo/VoodooII card can not run in a window! This means it will have
> absolutely NO affect on POV-Ray, which is why it works only for games, it
> will not speed up, make prettier or otherwise, in any way, shape or form
> help you to buy a voodoo card, invest in another 8M card (I'm selling a
> FireGL Pro 1000 8M AGP :) but don't go for the Voodoo card, unless you want
> the games.
>
> - Tim -
>
> --
> Ross: It's the most beautiful, natural thing in the world.
> Joey: Yeah, we know, but there's a baby sucking on it!

--
 george erhard
 microsoft certified system engineer
 http://home.pacbell.net/dcnblues

 remove "nospam" from domain when replying

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george erhard <geo### [at] pacbellnet> wrote:
: If you want to 'speed up' rendering, get more RAM, faster and larger disks, and
: a faster processor (or processors!!);

  Getting more RAM and faster disks helps only if povray uses more memory than
the physical RAM. If povray uses 1M of RAM, getting 64 Megs more will not
help a bit. A faster disk will help only if povray swaps a lot. A larger disk
will not speed anything (why should it?).
  A faster cpu and fpu will speed considerably, and also a faster bus. Larger
cache might speed up also.

-- 
main(i){char*_="BdsyFBThhHFBThhHFRz]NFTITQF|DJIFHQhhF";while(i=
*_++)for(;i>1;printf("%s",i-70?i&1?"[]":" ":(i=0,"\n")),i/=2);} /*- Warp. -*/

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(I know this is an old post, btw)

no!  No!  NO!

This is a HUGE misconception about 3D accelerators.  It doesn't do ANYTHING
for POV-Ray because:

1) POV-Ray is not written for 3D accelerators.
2) The images POV-Ray generates are WAY too complicated for even the best 3D
cards.
3) The 3Dfx Voodoo Graphics, Voodoo2, the Voodoo Banshee, and even the new
Voodoo3 do NOT support anything other than 16-bit color in 3D accelerated
mode (that's 65535 colors).

I'm hyper, but you could probably tell how I wrote this message :) :) :) :)
:) :)

-Ian

P.S. MORE CAPPUCCINO, PLEASE!

Ken <tyl### [at] pacbellnet> wrote in message
news:36107F5C.46A7B090@pacbell.net...
> s wrote:
>
> > If l used one of the newer 3-D video cards - Creative Lab's
> > Voodoo for instance would this significantly improve rendering time
and/or
> > quality ? I realise that these cards are manufactured for gaming but
could
> > they work or is it worth buying a decent PCI SVGA card ?
> >
> > Shaun.
>
>   It might make your images look prettier but it will have
> no effect at all on your rendering time. The reason for
> this is because Pov uses very complex mathmatical
> calculations that simply take a lot of CPU power to
> process. The video card on the other hand is a fast,
> almost real time device. It just sits there, waiting on
> your CPU to finish what it's doing, before it passes
> on a little more of the image to be displayed.
>
> Ken Tyler
>

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