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Mac vs. PC render-off


AndyM

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I thought some of you might be interested in this.We use both PC's and Mac's in our office and have just purchased renderworks for the Mac. With a 6 pack of beer riding on it we had a speed test between a Win XP PIII 933 w/512 MB and a Mac OS 9.1 dual G4 533 w/512 MB (360 MB allocated to VW). Both with dual monitors running the same resolution. The test file was about 20MB with a dozen of so textures.

Fast RenderWorksPC - 0:51 Mac - 0:50

Custom renderworks with raytracingPC - 4:09 Mac - 6:21

Exporting 1000x700 pxl image to .psd PC - 3:02 Mac - 4:41

I use the PC and quite frankly I expected to lose, but I will enjoy my PC a little more from now on. Any comments on why the mac lost?

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Well for one thing, we do not support more than 1 CPU in VectorWorks. That is on the wish list for a future version, a very high priority one at that.

Also, we do not particularly optimize the code for Altivec or MMX/SSE. This may change in the future as we are always looking to speed up RenderWorks with each version. When I last asked about this, I was told that the rendering operations we do are not parallel in nature. So even if we did support these instructions, there would not be much gain at this time.

So to answer your question... raw floating point performance is king.

Matthew GiampapaNNA Technical Support

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Actually, some of the later drivers may change this.

Since your dilemma a while back we bought a G450 and our OpenGL developer is still using it.

Admittedly she does not use it for a dual head machine, but I just enabled dual display on it (As a single extended display) and went into OpenGL mode without a crash.

Try updating your drivers again from the Matrox site and give it another try. (It's that or it could be the fact that she was running a development copy of VW 10 at the time)

Matthew GiampapaNNA Technical Support

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