Comments in line. > Vortex Swirling wrote:/
> >
> > I have been wondering what makes for
> > a fast Fractint setup nowadays?/
>
> A real fast PC running straight DOS. :-)
>
> But I use two machines for the rendering of Jim's FOTDs:
> • A 10-year old P3 running Win-98.
> • An 7-year old P4 running Win-XP. Out of necessity, I built a new machine a few months ago. The processor
is an Intel I7 920 2.66Ghz. It has 4 physical cores and 8 logical cores.
> />
> > What I would like for the group to do
> > is pick one of the FOTD's which is
> > computationally intensive. Then those
> > who'd like to participate generate said
> > fractal and report times with a system
> > description./
>
> The recent "Seahorse Valley-12" has a rather lengthy calc-time. We
> already know how long it took on Jim's machine. I tried this on both setups. On the DosBox setup (with cycles=max) it
was taking north of 3 hours so I evoked the mercy rule and just stopped
it. This was at 320x240.
On Ubuntu 64 running xfractint 20.04.9 I completed in around 18 minutes.
It would probably have been a bit faster but I kept messing around
during the run. The screen size was the default of 800x600 so this is
higher than Jim's 640x480.
I check the Performance Monitor which running this and it was indeed
using all 8 processors.
Well that settles it, I will use xfractint. xfractint needs a little
work but, if set up right it works. I can't seem to walk around
directories without crashing so I make sure that the pars and formula I
am working with are in the pars and formulas directories. The -geometry
parameter doesn't seem to work and it is difficult to resize the screen
and know what its going to be. I can't change maps. I can't do disk
video. Sound doesn't work.
Color cycling is not possible the way xfractint is written. However, it
might be possible to load the gif in a seperate OpenGL application and,
given the map as a parameter, be able to do the color cycle. The OpenGL
application, "Antiprism", where I have done programming work can do it.
(I didn't code the color cycling but the code for it was open source and
free to be added in).
> Too bad FractInt will not run on my double QuadCore 64-bit 16-MB RAM
> machine. Up until a couple of months ago, it rated the highest in speed
> doing similar fractal rendering tests in two other email lists.
> /
> >
> > Also any tweaks or suggested improvements
> > in system setup are welcome./
>
> I can make a few when it comes to the Windows OS. There are so many
> things that get established a certain way with the default settings.
> And they really slow machines down. After months, I am still running Vista 64 with most of the defaults.
This are so fast I haven't had to change anything. If it were to shave a
minute off xfractint's time I probably wouldn't find it worth it. If it
halved the time it would be different story.
