I'm inviting everyone here to participate in a test to compare the Vue render speeds on their various computer systems. To do this, I'd like everyone to render a stock scene on their system and report the results as well as the specifics of your system (CPU type and speed, amount and type of RAM, Video card, Operating System, etc.) The scene I chose is Cactus Motel. I chose it because it has 5 lights, 153 objects and 2,348,318 polygons, which should give our systems a thorough workout. It also has a lot of busyness to the bit map and should push the antialiasing pretty hard. I chose 800x450 as the resolution because everyone here should be able to render to screen with at least 800x600 resolution. Any higher and some people may not be able to participate. I did 3 tests: Final Render to screen, Final Render to disk, and Ultra render to screen. Here are the results on my system: Final to screen - 13 minutes, 59 seconds. Final to disk - 13 minutes, 17 seconds. Ultra to screen - 1 hour, 8 minutes, 25 seconds. My system is a Dell Pentium III 1 GHz with 256 megs of PC133 SDRAM and an Nvidia TNT2 M64 with 32 megs of RAM, running on Windows ME. I was surprised that the render to disk was faster than the render to screen. On my old system, it was always much slower. For those of you who don't know how to load the "Cactus Motel" scene: From the "File" menu in Vue3, choose, "Open". Click on the Collection titled, "More Samples". Double click on the first scene in the first row. The scene should load. From the "Picture" menu, choose, "Render Options". Switch the Render quality to, "Final", the render destination to, "Screen" and the picture size and resolution to 800x450 for the first render. Click "OK" and allow the scene to render completely, including antialiasing. Make note of the total render time. Go back to picture options and check the "Render to disk" box. Render to whatever folder you wish, but make sure to file format is "BMP" (I don't know if compressed files take loner or not) Make sure the color depth is 16 million. Click "OK" and render. For the last render, uncheck the "Render to disk" box and switch the render quality to "Ultra" I'm going to try the scene this evening on my old PII 400 just to see how much speed I gained by upgrading. Should be interesting. I look forward to seeing your results. -SMT

Smallspace, Ok, I'm game. I'll give it a try later when I have to be away from my PC, with one of the options, and I'll try to fit in another one of the tests when I go to bed tonight-- let the ol' PC "do it's thing", ya know. WHAT?!? You ONLY have the 1 GHZ? I thought everyone had upgraded to the 2GHZ Athlon by now- I did, and I can't believe it's speed.... 'scuse me, I'm dreaming out loud again. ;) 600 MHZ Athlon here on Windows 98 SE I'll let you know the results no later than tomorrow morning. It sounds like an interesting test, and I hope I won't be the only one to try it. Cheers, Mike

Hi Mike, I've announced this test over at 3DCommune as well, and I've already had the first result come back: Athlon Thunderbird 700 Mhz, 128 MB RAM, Elsa Erazor III Graphics Adapter, running Win98 SR1 Final to screen - 16 minutes, 45 seconds. Final to disk - 16 minutes, 39 seconds. Ultra to screen - 1 hour, 21 minutes, 59 seconds If I have enough people get involved, I may send the info to E-On (no names, of course) and see if they have any use for it. -SMT

Ok. The numbers are in for my old computer. It's a Tigerdirect Pentium II 400 on a Microstar MS6119 ATX BX2 main board with 256 meg of PC100 SDRAM, and a Guillemot Xentor 32 2X AGP video card. I'm going to use this computer as the benchmark for this test with all other computer list as a percentage of it's render marks. Half as fast would get a rating of 50. Twice as fast would get a rating of 200. Just as fast would get a rating of 100, and so on. Here are its Cactus Motel render ratings: Final to screen: 35 minutes, 50 seconds Final to disk: 38 minutes, 16 seconds Ultra to screen: 2 hours, 59 minutes, 18 seconds With that as a benchmark, my new Dell would get an average rating of 269. The Athlon Thunderbird 700 would get an average rating of 221. -SMT

SMT, My "Final to Screen" rendering ended up taking 20 min., 19 sec. I didn't try to do the final to diskl, though, but I have to assume it would have been even less time. Ultra to Scree was 2 hr, 24 min, but I had my Eudora mail open the whole time,as well as Mc Affee and Zone Alarm running. I don't know if that should make a difference or not in rendering speed? Windows 98 SE, Athlon 600 mhz K7, 128 MB RAM, on a Compaq (yes, I know you hate Compaq, but I like it), with the Voodoo 3 graphics card. Far as SDRAM goes, I have no idea, and I don't know how to find out! Cheers, Mike PS I'll try the Ultra again with no other programs running, later.

Attached Link: http://www.egroups.com/database/vuedesprit?method=reportRows&tbl=4

My dislike of Compaq stems mainly from working for an electronics manufacturer that makes a PCI plug n play audio recording card. The Compaqs cause us more installation problems than any other computer because of shortcuts they used in their mainboards. But hey, if it works without problems for you, then why not? They certainly are competitively priced. Michael Wagner has set up an area on the eGroups Vue user group where everyone can post their results. Go to the link listed. -SMT

Attached Link: http://www.wagner-hubert.de/vuebench.htm

Michael has now provided a little script that calculates the benchmark result, and a link from there to the benchmark page. -SMT

• looking over my shoulder to see if Bloodsong is watching* Yeah, I saw that script, but I still have incomplete information. I'll try to get it all in tonight, and take it to the Vue List. Cheers, Mike

Sorry, too busy with other things. No time to bother with this sort of thing. Have fun, you guys. :)

Attached Link: http://www.wagner-michael.com/vuebench.htm

Hi! My homepage adress has changed. please use the new link to the benchmark page now.