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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.
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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.
Roger