Happy New Year!

I currently use my IBM Aptiva S-90 200mhz Pentium MMX , 32mb RAM, 2MB
ATI Mach 64.
I use POV-Ray v3.2 32bit

What hardware should I purchase to speed up my rendering performance?

Thanks, and please reply by email.

-- 
John P. Kavanagh
Kav### [at] aolcom
Buffalo, NY

Stellar Link    http://stellarlink.base.org
  - Web Page Design
  - Photorealistic Art
  - Space Resources on the Internet
  - Space Consulting


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More memory and SCSI only. Having only SCSI in your system can reduce
render
times 30%

Timothy A. Grubb

John P. Kavanagh wrote:

> Happy New Year!
>
> I currently use my IBM Aptiva S-90 200mhz Pentium MMX , 32mb RAM, 2MB
> ATI Mach 64.
> I use POV-Ray v3.2 32bit
>
> What hardware should I purchase to speed up my rendering performance?
>
> Thanks, and please reply by email.
>
> --
> John P. Kavanagh
> Kav### [at] aolcom
> Buffalo, NY
>
> Stellar Link    http://stellarlink.base.org
>   - Web Page Design
>   - Photorealistic Art
>   - Space Resources on the Internet
>   - Space Consulting
>
> PGP public key available upon request.
> -----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
> Version: 2.6.2
>
> mQCNAzPiFN0AAAEEAKZbG1JeFuysCIiDviu3GcoebniOR4rCIDXegRJGILdqbO8F
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> /9uK5OOoLBszfQMzOwsWPFHEaon1v71OyTTEuc66Ha42DJxG6UFabJZz8HHJAAUR
> tC9Kb2huIFBhdWwgUGF0cmljayBLYXZhbmFnaCA8S2F2YW5hZ2hOWUBhb2wuY29t
> Pg==
> =3Ns/
> -----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----

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Tim Grubb wrote:
> 
> More memory and SCSI only. Having only SCSI in your system can reduce
> render
> times 30%
> 
> Timothy A. Grubb

Can you expand on the SCSI part? I am unfamiliar with the details.

Thanks.

-- 
John P. Kavanagh
Kav### [at] aolcom
Buffalo, NY

Stellar Link    http://stellarlink.base.org
  - Web Page Design
  - Photorealistic Art
  - Space Resources on the Internet
  - Space Consulting


PGP public key available upon request.
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This type of speed upgrade is only if you are serious about rendering as
fast as possible
as it is fairly expensive. SCSI devices, HD, ZIP, CD, etc... are much
faster than
their IDE counterparts because a SCSI controller  that you install in your
system moves
some of the work from your CPU to itself. SCSI is more expensive than IDE
though by
 about 1 3/4 to 3 times as much depending on what you are buying. I must
say though
that if you are only rendering single frames or every once in awhile that
the cost is not
worth it. I am not a hardware guru, I can just tell the differences since I
have 5 PC's here
from pII300 to p133. I run perf and comparison tests so that I can better
suggest equipment for my work and customers.

Timothy A. Grubb

John P. Kavanagh wrote:

> Tim Grubb wrote:
> >
> > More memory and SCSI only. Having only SCSI in your system can reduce
> > render
> > times 30%
> >
> > Timothy A. Grubb
>
> Can you expand on the SCSI part? I am unfamiliar with the details.
>
> Thanks.
>
> --
> John P. Kavanagh
> Kav### [at] aolcom
> Buffalo, NY
>
> Stellar Link    http://stellarlink.base.org
>   - Web Page Design
>   - Photorealistic Art
>   - Space Resources on the Internet
>   - Space Consulting
>
> PGP public key available upon request.
> -----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
> Version: 2.6.2
>
> mQCNAzPiFN0AAAEEAKZbG1JeFuysCIiDviu3GcoebniOR4rCIDXegRJGILdqbO8F
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> /9uK5OOoLBszfQMzOwsWPFHEaon1v71OyTTEuc66Ha42DJxG6UFabJZz8HHJAAUR
> tC9Kb2huIFBhdWwgUGF0cmljayBLYXZhbmFnaCA8S2F2YW5hZ2hOWUBhb2wuY29t
> Pg==
> =3Ns/
> -----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----

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>This type of speed upgrade is only if you are serious about rendering as
>fast as possible
>as it is fairly expensive. SCSI devices, HD, ZIP, CD, etc... are much
>faster than
>their IDE counterparts because a SCSI controller  that you install in your


wouldnt it be better to buy oodles of memory for the same price and have a
large ramdisk?

Rarius

PS isnt IDE mode5 just as quick as SCSI?
PPS Thinking again... raytracing is so processor intensive that anything
thta takes the load of the processor has got to be good news!

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I use an EIDE hard drive with the proprietary controller on the MB. At 7ns
access time it is just as fast as SCSI (which I used to own). I got tired
of buying devices that cost many times more, yet seem to burn up with an
increasing frequency. It's probably not the devices fault (SCSI I mean),
but an expense is an expense.

Put your money on fast RAM and CPUs.

Paul Hinds
gri### [at] swbellnet

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If you use a ramdisk, you need to make sure that the scenes memory use is
low or it will swap to disk, the only real performance gain in using a ram
disk is that writing the image to disk is faster during render, but this
only happens for about 2ms every second - don't bother with a ramdisk.

the reason that SCSI is faster is because of virtual memory - where you
don't have enough memory for your scene, a disk is used instead. If you run
win95 version, windows needs to be running from SCSI to get the speed
boost, if you run dos version, you need to run povray from a scsi drive. I
don't know about linux (whether the swapping is performed by the OS and
whether you can choose the drive used for the swap file).

Be careful about upgrading RAM to more than 64Mb, I have heard (though I'm
not sure that it is right) that to access RAM addressed over 64Mb, RAM
swapping must occur, I'm a little surprised by this since in protected mode
(I think, or is it real mode - one emulates the old, dumb memory
addressing), 386+ can address upto 4Gb without problems. So it may be
prudent to keep you RAM to 64Mb or less unless you need more to avoid
swapping (you will need a very complex scene, or you will need to run the
windows version of povray).

PS. don't quote me on any of the last paragraph.

-- 
Tristan Wibberley

(Remove the '.NO_LUNCHEON_MEAT' from my
email address to reply.)

GrimDude <grimdude&nos### [at] swbellnet> wrote in article
<01bd1fdf$0c88c560$e5681cce@arkansasusa.com.arkansasusa.com>...
| I use an EIDE hard drive with the proprietary controller on the MB. At
7ns
| access time it is just as fast as SCSI (which I used to own). I got tired
| of buying devices that cost many times more, yet seem to burn up with an
| increasing frequency. It's probably not the devices fault (SCSI I mean),
| but an expense is an expense.
| 
| Put your money on fast RAM and CPUs.
| 
| Paul Hinds
| gri### [at] swbellnet
| 
|

Post a reply to this message

On 11 Feb 98 14:12:17 GMT, "Tristan Wibberley"
<tri### [at] compaqcom> wrote:

>Be careful about upgrading RAM to more than 64Mb, I have heard (though I'm
>not sure that it is right) that to access RAM addressed over 64Mb, RAM
>swapping must occur, I'm a little surprised by this since in protected mode
>(I think, or is it real mode - one emulates the old, dumb memory
>addressing), 386+ can address upto 4Gb without problems. So it may be
>prudent to keep you RAM to 64Mb or less unless you need more to avoid
>swapping (you will need a very complex scene, or you will need to run the
>windows version of povray).

My understanding of the 64Mb problem was that some Intel chipsets
don't perform caching of RAM over 64Mb, which makes memory above the
64Mb mark significantly slower.

Post a reply to this message

Ronald L. Parker <ron### [at] farmworkscom> wrote in article
<34e### [at] 100233>...
| On 11 Feb 98 14:12:17 GMT, "Tristan Wibberley"
| <tri### [at] compaqcom> wrote:
| 
| >Be careful about upgrading RAM to more than 64Mb, I have heard (though
I'm
| >not sure that it is right) that to access RAM addressed over 64Mb, RAM
| >swapping must occur, I'm a little surprised by this since in protected
mode
| >(I think, or is it real mode - one emulates the old, dumb memory
| >addressing), 386+ can address upto 4Gb without problems. So it may be
| >prudent to keep you RAM to 64Mb or less unless you need more to avoid
| >swapping (you will need a very complex scene, or you will need to run
the
| >windows version of povray).
| 
| My understanding of the 64Mb problem was that some Intel chipsets
| don't perform caching of RAM over 64Mb, which makes memory above the
| 64Mb mark significantly slower.

Aaah, that'd be it, but if you use SDRAM, the speed lost is *almost*
immeasurable.

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>My understanding of the 64Mb problem was that some Intel chipsets
>don't perform caching of RAM over 64Mb, which makes memory above the
>64Mb mark significantly slower.

I believe that the Pentium II raises this limit to either 256 MB or 1 GB
(can't remember.)

--

-aardvarko
aardvarko at geocities dot com


Ronald L. Parker wrote in message <34e### [at] 100233>...

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