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.

[Ian Pellant]

Attached is a test plan for ray trace benchmarking.

It's an exterior frontal view of a simple house with plants to test textures, reflectivity and shadows.

In the plan file is a camera named: "Benchmark Camera" - Open the view (don't move within it) then hit the Ray Trace button and Ray Trace with the set "Benchmark" configuration.

Also in the file is the ray traced image.

When finished, Chief will display the ray trace elapsed time in the view title bar.

My results have been intriguing:
Intel P4 660 3.60 GHz - timed: 18:09 minutes
AMD Sempron 3400+ - timed: 25:19 minutes

The Sempron only has 1GB RAM and it hit the pagefile a little... slowing it a mite. All synthetic CPU benchmarks have always rated the Sempron as being a lot slower than the Intel than it really is.

Atempts to obtain a meaningful comparison by exporting to POV Ray were foiled by Chief not exporting the configuration settings. Dismissed the results (after re-running at 640x480 NoAA) of 24:00 minutes and 29:48 minutes respectively... but the relative times seem consistent.

These are 2006 vintage computers.... how much faster are the current breed?

Take the challenge and gain bragging rights for your computer.

Cheers.

[lbuttery]

These are 2006 vintage computers.... how much faster are the current breed?


Ian:

seriously ???

I suspect they are "light-years" faster

I don't do raytraces - nor benchmarking
so I have no personal experience

but I can say that a 2006 PC is rapidly approaching "antique" status

Lew

[evergreen]

I ran the benchmark on my system - 3.09 minutes
I bought my box from Best Buy in 2010 for a grand
Lets see; Windows 7, 64 bit (x4, 64 bit)
Hardware; intel core i7, 8 meg ram, 1 meg ATI Radeon