X4 Ray Tracing - Optimal CPU

[Ian Pellant]

rongobong,
Thanks for the reply.

I'm back in Australia... it's not worth buying computer parts from overseas... darn hard to enforce any warranty; or deal with shipping (a fortune by air or 2 months by sea).

The AMD FX-8xx series have 8 full, true cores... not 4 with dual threading as do the Intels.

I have created a test Plan that is currently running POV on the other computer.
Chief X4 ray tracer completes it in just under 20 minutes. Exported to POV; POV Ray 3.6 took 1 hour, 52 minutes to ray trace it.

Conclusion so far: the CA X4 ray tracer is about 5.5 times faster than POV Ray on an Intel P4 660 3.6 GHz. Unfortunately, the POV Ray image is brighter and cleaner than the CA X4 image.... there is a bug/feature in the X4 Export that doesn't quite send the same lighting data. It literally would take hours to try all the settings to get the same render result.

I will post results and the test plan file later.

Cheers.