Thought someone might be interested in the following information.


I set up a Sun Ultra Sparc workstation as follows

HARDWARE:

    Dual sparc 168mhz processors with sparc floating point processors
    128Mb of memory
    12Gb of Disk space


OPERATING SYSTEM:

    Sun Solaris v2.6
    Common Desktop Environment v1.0 (Now available with Solaris v2.6)

COMPILATION COMPONENTS:  (All built specifically for 
sparc-sun-solaris2.6)

    gcc v2.8.1
    binutils v2.8.1
    gdb v4.16
    make v3.76.1
    libstdc++ v2.8.1

POVRAY SOURCE v3.02   (also compiled compression tools that came with 
POV-Ray Source)


I built the x-povray version of the product with little trouble.  I 
built a Sun Package (using pkgmk) to install the POV product in 
/opt/local/ which is the preferred location for 3rd party products for 
Solaris.  This makes the pkgadd and pkgrm of POV-Ray from a Sun box 
effortless.

My testing of the POV engine has had zero problems and the POV x-povray 
works well with the CDE (Common Desktop Environment).  I've tested the 
program with several sustained, simultaneous animation renders.  Here's 
some numbers I've come up with.

A single 62 frame animation render outperformed an Intel (PentPro 
180mhz) by 33% (Sparc was 33% faster).  The Ultra-Sparc render reported 
more sampling, but I could not tell any significant difference in the 
resulting avi file.

Muliple, simultaneous animation renders (3 scenes ranging from 48 to 62 
frames) buried the Intel, but the Ultra-Sparc showed no signs of 
slowing.  (I may try adding additional simultaneous renders to see when 
the Ultra slows when I get time)

Obviously, anyone would expect a Dual Sparc to outperform Intel.  I 
report the results as a "Frame of Reference".  Does anyone have a 
suggestion where I could look in the POV source to get even more 
performance out of the Solaris v2.6 build?  I mean something simple, 
like a header setting or compile option.

McNaul

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