Article: 17531 of comp.sys.atari.st Path: nenuphar.saclay.cea.fr!julienas!mcsun!uunet!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!howland.reston.ans.net!math.ohio-state.edu!news2.uunet.ca!xenitec!tdkcs!semprini.waterloo-rdp.on.ca!cherborth From: cherborth@semprini.waterloo-rdp.on.ca (Chris Herborth) Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st Distribution: world Message-ID: Organization: InterZONE Design Subject: POV-Ray 2.0 timings Reply-To: cherborth@semprini.waterloo-rdp.on.ca X-Software: HERMES GUS 1.10 Rev. May 17 1993 Date: Thu, 07 Oct 1993 22:54:06 EST MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Lines: 32 Here are some feel-good numbers for you folks that think I have nothing good to say about the Atari platform... ;-) POV-Ray 2.0 was released this week (yahoo!)... POV-Ray is a really great free raytracer, and version 2 has some serious performance boosts... I compiled POV 2.0 for OS/2 at work using GCC 2.3.3 (optimised) and for my ST using GCC 2.4.4 (optimised) under MiNT. Here's how long it took me to trace a very simple scene (basicvue.pov; an orange sphere on a blue plane): '386/33 8M RAM, OS/2 2.1 - 1 hour 40 minutes, 20 seconds. '486/33 28M RAM, OS/2 2.1 - 0 " 0 " 33 seconds. (!!!) Atari ST, 4M RAM, MiNT 1.08 - 1 " 45 " 36 seconds. That's right folks, the 8Mhz 68000 was _almost_as_fast_ as the '386/33. Why? I'm not sure; perhaps the TOS version of GCC optimises better, or perhaps our math library is faster at this sort of calculation. Now, for those of you who think a Falcon030 is the same performance as a '486dx2/66, it would've traced the image in about 20 seconds. The Falcon would probably do it in 50 minutes (and that's being generous). Oh, what POV-Ray options did I use? +w320 +h200 +q9 +a0.3 +ft (320x200x24-bits, save as a TARGA file, highest quality, best anti-aliasing) -- -------------------========================================------------------- cherborth@semprini.waterloo-rdp.on.ca Chris Herborth