Forum: Bryce


Subject: Bryce 5.5 - my first observations.......

Flak opened this issue on May 04, 2005 ยท 40 posts


Flak posted Wed, 04 May 2005 at 9:33 AM

RENDER TIMES

I test rendered 3 scenes of various complexity and properties.

The first scene was a fairly simple scene - a castle on a couple of rocky terrains sitting in the middle of a water plane with a bit of volumetric fog. Only using the sunlight, default render settings. Its at this link-> http://uqconnect.net/wasteland/g1/stormcastle001a2.jpg
Bryce 5 - 10:02
Bryce 5.5 - 5:55

The second scene is the one used in the opengl demo above. Its not that extreme, coming in at about 20 lights all up and 70MB of br5 file. The textures are a mix of procedural and some image textures, so I call this an average sort of scene. Default render settings.
Bryce 5 - 1:18:30
Bryce 5.5 - 56:01
Bryce 5 on PIII 450 - 6:39:49 (just for amusement)

The third scene was one that had about 30 fully plate armoured knights with some small amount of reflection on their shiny armour in a grassy field (grass was made up of lots of 2d transmapped image planes). This is a heavier scene with a fair few polygons, coming in at about 220MB. Lighting was done with an array of 10 radial linear falloff lights. Default render options.
Bryce 5 - 1:12:57
Bryce 5.5 - 1:40:42

In general, what I saw in the times matched up with what DAZ said you'd see (at some stage) - the biggest gains in render speed are for the smaller files. The third scene however was a lot slower in bryce5.5 than in bryce5. Maybe Bryce5.5 isn't as good as 5 at dealing with lots of transmapped grass objects and the lights going through them and reflections on armour and what not. It sort of makes me wonder if a part of the optimization they did involved playing around with some nested loops in the code, which for small scenes might make them quicker, but when you start getting bigger scenes, the nesting starts to become a hinderance.

The other thing I noticed about the rendering was that the hyperthreaded cpu when using bryce5 simply put all the rendering load onto one of the two virtual cpu's (i.e. one of the virtual CPUs ran at about 100% during rendering while the second virtual CPU did nothing).

When running bryce5.5, the load was shared over both virtual CPUs fairly evenly, but only using about 45% of each virtual CPU. Thus just like bryce 5, it still only used about half of the available CPU power, though now it spread it out. Is that a normal thing in XP with hyperthreading?? - i.e will a multithreaded app only use 50% maximum of the cpu?

Render times didn't seem to be affected whether I had just used an old b5 file or a newly saved from within b5.5 file for the render.

So thats about it at this early stage - don't have the time yet to go brutalize the DazStudio side of things... yet..... any thoughts??

Message edited on: 05/04/2005 09:46

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