improving rendering times with POV ray
i have a friend who's doing some work on a building in his spare time.
he's trying to render what it's going to look like, and is using POV ray to do it.
for kicks he's benchmarking it against a wide variety of platforms/hardware to see which will give him the best render times. (1 image takes hours and hours to complete, so any advantage would be welcome)
here's where my question comes in. i downloaded POV ray and ran it through his test image on my dual 2.0Ghz G5.
it was slower than his 3.0Ghz Xeon. so i'm wondering if anyone knows of any tips or tricks to improve the rendering speed of POV ray on a G5 running 10.3 POV ray is FPU intensive, so it really should have done well on this test.
thanks in advance.
he's trying to render what it's going to look like, and is using POV ray to do it.
for kicks he's benchmarking it against a wide variety of platforms/hardware to see which will give him the best render times. (1 image takes hours and hours to complete, so any advantage would be welcome)
here's where my question comes in. i downloaded POV ray and ran it through his test image on my dual 2.0Ghz G5.
it was slower than his 3.0Ghz Xeon. so i'm wondering if anyone knows of any tips or tricks to improve the rendering speed of POV ray on a G5 running 10.3 POV ray is FPU intensive, so it really should have done well on this test.
thanks in advance.
Comments
Just for the heck of it, you might try MegaPOV:
http://users.skynet.be/smellenbergh/
It's been a while since I did any renders, so I can't comment on POV-Ray vs MegaPOV render times.
Obviously, your render settings can have a DRASTIC impact on render times. I assume you're using the exact same settings as the PC. Maybe crank up the render priority in preferences?
In POV-Ray, there is also an option to choose from 2 different render engines-- "Official" and "Official for G4". Have you tried both? Hopefully someday there will be one for G5.
Make sure you turn off the preview-- that makes a huge difference IIRC.
i've done a little more looking into this, and found out a few other thigns.
the POV ray i downloaded actually has an official "G5" setting, problem is it's slower than the G4 one. IIRC, the Xeon rendered the scene in about 2,400 second, while the G5 took around 2,800. not a huge difference, but i think the G5 could certainly get closer than that.
edit: nevermind, found the preview option. will see how that goes.
Guess I'll go download 3.5.1 RC1.