I was wondering if POV on Windows 95 supports or uses MMX and/or any 3D card
to improve performance? Also I heard last night from a friend that, the
speed is only from the CPU and RAM, is this true?

Thanks,

Scott

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On Wed, 21 Jan 1998 10:21:19 +1100, "Scott Anderson"
<sta### [at] powercomau> wrote:

>I was wondering if POV on Windows 95 supports or uses MMX

It uses the bigger internal cache of the mmx processors, about the
commands, I think the mmx set is only for some graphical ins and outs,
that POV does not need.

> and/or any 3D card
>to improve performance?

To put the data out onto the screen, which is what the card usually
does, takes in average less than a 10000th of the time spend by POV
calculating and shuffling internal data, so different cards might only
improve the appearance of the picture in quality on the screen.

> Also I heard last night from a friend that, the
>speed is only from the CPU and RAM, is this true?

And the cacheable area of the motherboard/chipset, that is the amount
of memory the chipset can administrate. A TX board for example has
a good performance within 64 megs of ram onboard, but, installed more,
will decrease in performance dramatically. But taken, memory stays
within cacheable area, it is bus speed, processor speed, the maximum
allowed memory onboard(see above) and the speed of your harddisk
system that determines the speed of, here, POV.
 
>
>Thanks,
>
>Scott
>
>

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Scott Anderson (sta### [at] powercomau) wrote:
> I was wondering if POV on Windows 95 supports or uses MMX and/or any 3D card

The MMX itself does not help really, but it happens that the FPU of the
MMX processors has been optimized, so MMX Pentiums should be faster than
non-MMX ones (given a clock frequency).

The 3D card will be totally useless, since the calculations they can do
(3D polygons with mapping and lighting) have no relation (besides the
result, which is a synthetic image) to the ones POV-Ray makes, nor
to the ones made by any other ray-tracer. The approach is completely
different.

> to improve performance? Also I heard last night from a friend that, the
> speed is only from the CPU and RAM, is this true?

Not really. The amount of cache memory plays a role, too. But hard disk
capacity plays none, nor does the sound card of course. If your RAM is
small, the hard disk speed could improve the rendering speed, because it
influences the swapping times.

> Thanks,

You're welcome.
  B-o-b
--

bob### [at] casimirrezelenstfr -- Linux, POV-Ray, LaTeX

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I used to have a Cyrix chip in the system I'm using here. It had a heat
problem , which led me to replace it, but I did notice a performance
increase, within Pov-Ray, when I went to a *slower* Intel chip. The Cyrix
was a 150+, and the Intel is a 100. So, was the heat problem causing a
performance hit, or does Intel have more then a single math pipe, (which
would help I guess)?
  Also, I hear there's a 16 processor Intel system out there. Has anyone
re-coded Pov-Ray to take advantage of such a thing (I heard the answer to
Scott's question). I had a multi-processor system before, but somehow
running 16 copies of Pov-Ray just doesn't interest me. I believe it would
make one helluva server, though.
  Cautioning me about the cost of such a system is pointless, if it will
speed up rendering.
--
Paul Hinds
gri### [at] swbellnet

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Hi,

POV Ray doesn't use any hardware-assisted acceleration technologies.
It will not use MMX nor DirectX nor OpenGL. It will not use more than 1
CPU (you posted this question too).

I think it is the price of being generic and portable in the most simple
way.
Anyway I don't understand technical reasons for not using multiprocessor
computers on any platform. MMX (and upcoming MMX2, which includes
some vector-oriented floating-point operations) can improve the
performance but it is Wintel-specific (it has only 90% of the market--
who needs to support it specifically :-) and it is produced by some diabolic
company :-)) ). OpenGL is generic enough and can be used for some
oversimplified preview to test a scene geometry. (Upcoming merge of
OpenGL and DirectX will cover DirectX too).

I understand guys are working for free and they are doing the great
job! I don't even know any comparable products. You can use any
hardware platform you want to render pictures.

I understand that they didn't do this and that because they don't have
enough time to play with MMX or multiprocessors. Probably they
don't have multiprocessor computer handy to debug their stuff. I
believe guys don't have enough spare time to cover all bases and
they do their best!

Anyway, support of some features will be nice. :^)

Eugene

PS: Well, MMX can help on Linux and other non-Microsoft Intel-based
OSes.

-- Eugene Lazutkin (eug### [at] carnac-graphicscom)

Scott Anderson wrote in message <34c54d1e.0@news.povray.org>...
>I was wondering if POV on Windows 95 supports or uses MMX and/or any 3D
card
>to improve performance? Also I heard last night from a friend that, the
>speed is only from the CPU and RAM, is this true?
>
>Thanks,
>
>Scott
>
>

Post a reply to this message

Scott Anderson wrote:

> I was wondering if POV on Windows 95 supports or uses MMX and/or any 3D card
> to improve performance? Also I heard last night from a friend that, the
> speed is only from the CPU and RAM, is this true?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Scott

The Only diference that I have knoticed is that if you are using a card that has
Good Open GL support you may get beter performance with some of the modelers
that Use Open GL and work with POV.  But If you are just ray tracing It really
wont make any diferance at all ecept the TGA image may look real nice when you
vew it with a beter graphics card.

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