This is probably not an issue for those of you who don't do postwork. But for me, it's becoming more and more painful to create high resolution art in Photoshop, pieces that will ultimately be printed and must be high res. Can anyone relate to the excruciating wait times from that bloated program called Photoshop? It sucks RAM like a hungry vampire.

I usually have a hearts game open while I use Photoshop, because it sometimes takes twenty minutes to render a filter and if I don't have something to do while I'm waiting, I'll tear my hair out. Sometimes I actually clench my fists so hard----while waiting, waiting---that I have marks inside my palms. Some filters/actions aren't too bad---others take a full twenty minutes to execute.

I have a decent computer, and it's jazzed up with as much extra RAM as it can take. I also have an extra scratch drive. Not enough. I am praying that when the 64's come out this summer that these problems will be solved. It's so painful to create this way.

/rant   Thanks for listening to me whine. ;)

Hmmm... Why Stick With Wintellies, While You'll B Able 2 Get Yourself A Mac With Intel Inside =D

There Are More Than A Dozen Reasons 2 Switch 2 Mac, Just 1 2 Stick With PCs

Hope It Helps Ya

Attached Link: http://www.fractal-recursions.com/files/anim/anim.html

What is your CPU speed and what resolutions/filters are you talking about?  I got a dual core AMD (4200) last winter and everything got twice as fast.  Of course still not fast enough, but better.

Hi Jock:

Those animations are super. Really cool. Makes me want to smoke a joint, which I haven't done since '78. ;)

What filters? Oh gawd, tons and tons and tons. It could be native Photoshop filters or other ones such as the KTP filter packages, Eye Candy, Flaming Pear........etc. I have a LOAD of filters that I use.

Memory Load: 77%
Total Physical Memory: 536,330,240 bytes (511.48 MB)
In-Use Physical Memory: 414,715,904 bytes (395.50 MB)
Available Physical Memory: 121,614,336 bytes (115.98 MB)
Total Page File Size: 1,318,436,864 bytes (1.23 GB)
In-Use Page File Size: 454,012,928 bytes (432.98 MB)
Available Page File Size: 864,423,936 bytes (824.38 MB)
Total Virtual Memory: 2,147,352,576 bytes (2.00 GB)
In-Use Virtual Memory: 50,257,920 bytes (47.93 MB)
Available Virtual Memory: 2,097,094,656 bytes (1.95 GB)

Processor Architecture: Intel
CPU Manufacturer: GenuineIntel
Processor Level: Pentium III or higher (15)
Processor Revision: Model 2 Stepping 4
Approximate CPU Clock Rate: 2004 MHz
Number Of Processors: 1
Page Size: 4,096 bytes (4.00 KB)
Allocation Unit: 65,536 bytes (64.00 KB)
Minimum Application Address: 65,536
Maximum Application Address: 2,147,418,111
Slow Machine: No

Hi Harmen........I am a PC girl. :) Maybe one day I'll get a Mac when I have money to burn, but right now I am Mr. Gates' slave, unfortunately, through force of habit. :)

You could use some more RAM, another 512MB is only like $50.  Also have you tried Canasta, because that one is really fun too.

Hi Jock,

I would have gotten more RAM but my computer guy said he wasn't sure if my compy could take it. But the 64's are coming out VERY soon, and I am going to grab one. I pray that this solves my problem.

I really enjoyed those animations. They must be really time consuming to create, but so worth it. :)

What do you mean the "64's"? 

64 bit as opposed to what we all have now, 32 bit. Supposed to be more than doubly fast and very very powerful. :) It's the new generation of PCs.

OK I thought that's what you meant.   I'm running a 64 bit dual core now.  But I am using 32 bit Windows.   Dual core basically doubles the speed of any multithreaded app (eg UF, PS, and other programs we like to use).  I went from an Athlon 3100 (1 core, 1.8 ghz 256cache) to the 4200 (2 core, 2.2 ghz, 512 cache) and my render times are 2-3 times faster.   Of course I had to get a new motherboard.

Yes I have heard some people are doing that, and some programs are not built to handle the power of 64. You probably need every bit of power you can get your hands on with those animations :)

Until I get a new computer, I see much suffering (not to mention Hearts games) in my future :)

The 64's will be fast but I'm not sure if the latest Photoshop has been written to take advantage of the increased bus width. You see this a lot with games where some new tech, like PCI Express, comes out but then it's a while b4 the games are written to utilize the new capability. All of my old games can't do PCI Express - though my rig doesn't support that anyhow - so you had to wait for new games to come along. I hope I'm wrong but I'm thinking a newer version of PS may have to be released to handle 64 bits at a pop. Or, hopefully, they have anticipated it. Half the answer, though, is RAM, RAM and more RAM - lol.

I can dig where you're coming from, Mindy, though my biggest time problems come from UF4 itself. It seems to have a harder time handling mega-layer stuff than UF3 which sux because that's the only advantage UF has over other fractal programs other than the gradient editing/masking stuff. And don't get me started about the @$%#$^%#^$#$$$$&$^%#$@#@#@#^(($#$$#&&%#$&&(())(&^(^^%$$# bug in the program - that has been supposed to be fixed for the last 2-3 versions - that makes a layer pop a good ways left and up after you let go of it after getting it in the precise spot you want. If you look at the ring around the hole that the large orb is suspended in on my last post, "Spell-binder", you;ll see a nifty shine to the edge on the right side. I'd love to say I meant that but truth is that it came about on about the 50th try of trying to center the ring at something by 768 size. Never got it where I'd wanted it. VERY frustrating but it did turn out neat, I guess.

For the folks who know this stuff - I'm going to put together or buy a new rig soon and have some questions.

Is there any difference/advantage between having a dual-core AMD or a Pentium 4(Prescott?) I'm looking to go just under the max available core speed because I worry about heat dissipation/longevity issues with the very fastest CPU's and with the largest L2 cache and highest front-side bus clock speed.

And I'm planning to put together a "render farm" like Damien's and need to know the drawbacks, if any, to using Celeron processors. Each rig will have 1gb of RAM. I want to use the Celerons because they are much cheaper at 2.5GHz and I'm wanting to buy 4 of them.

C-ya!

Rick

Howdy Rick :)

Thanks for sticking your head in :)

Here's what you may consider  a dumb question, but please keep in mind that, even though I have used UF and am pretty comfortable with it, I am far from a UF expert. It's not my software of choice. So keep that in mind when I say the following.

 I still don't understand the reason why one can't use Photoshop for your layering instead. Certainly you can do much more with the color, saturation and blending end than you can with UF. In other words, why not export your image layers and then work with them in Photoshop? What can you do via layering in UF (besides generating the fractal) that you can't do in Photoshop? Or are you changing all layers at once as far as rendering a new mask/fractal/formula?

Yes, UF is the most sophisticated fractal software out there, but when it comes to graphics and color, overall control,  nothing can touch Photoshop.

As far as the other technical stuff re Pentium, duhhhh............I am totally ignorant. :)

Mindy,

As someone who was layering fractals before Photoshop came along, I think I can answer this question. Primarily, it comes down to interactivity. Secondarily, it comes down to printability.

When I started layering I was using FractInt. I created images, saved GIFs, and then brought them into a graphics program to do layering. (It doesn't have to be Photoshop. Lots of programs support layering. For convenience, we will assume I was using Photoshop.) The problem with doing this is that if there was any error in framing, I had to go back to FractInt, re-render the image, save it, and re-import it into my composite in PS. I found the back-and-forth to be more than just annoying, it was interfering with the creative flow and discouraging me from trying certain things.

Being able to do layering directly within one's fractal application is as much a benefit as being able to do it in Photoshop is. Imagine you are making a collage of photos using Photoshop, but it doesn't support it natively--instead, you can edit a single image to your heart's content, but you have to export all your cropped, trimmed, positioned images and use a separate program to composite them. You would think this is ridiculous. Well, that's sort of how I feel about not doing the layering directly in UF. You could, but it sure can cramp your style.

The second reason for layering directly within UF is printability. Now, lots of people who explore fractals don't care one whit about print quality, and that is fine. But for me, being able to reproduce a fractal image that I created at 1600x1200 as a large 8000x6000 print is pretty darned important. If I do my layering inside UF, I can do it on the manageable 1600x1200 image and UF will automatically adjust when it renders the larger size, and it will do the compositing for me on the final render. If I use Photoshop for my compositing, then I get all of Photoshop's wonderful tools, but if I want a print version, I have to be prepared to import many 8000x6000 images into Photoshop and assemble the composite manually. Each of those layers is 137M. I have one image I actually printed that had 52 layers, which would have required over 7G of swap space in Photoshop to handle. Imagine how long that would have taken. I can imagine, and I can promise that if UF didn't handle layering internally, I would never have produced that image, simply because it would have been prohibitive to try printing it. That avenue of creativity would have been closed, by virtue of my tool selection. I can see you're actually running into this with PS already.

This is not to say that Photoshop is not valuable tool. The only people who suggest that PS is useless or has no place are either substantially unaware of what PS can do or are deliberately deluding themselves. But the advantage of being able to layer directly in your primary creative environment should not be ignored. If your primary creative environment is Photoshop, rather than UF, then it's completely reasonable that this might not be obvious.

As to more specific things, what you can do in UF that you can't do in Photoshop: you can control gradients, colors, blending in ways that you can't in PS. You have a couple of merge modes that PS doesn't (particularly HSL Addition, one of my favorites, which produces some very interesting texture effects). The reverse is also true, PS has some that UF doesn't. Moving the entire fractal and re-framing can't be done in PS, you have to go back to the fractal app.

If you're going to build a serious Photoshop rig, you want (1) lots of RAM. See if you can find a system that will take 4G of RAM, and put 4G in it. (That way, your other programs will not be competing with Photoshop for memory.) (2) You want really fast hard drives. When Photoshop runs out of RAM, it uses swap space on disk, and for that you want fast. Find a SATA (Serial ATA) system that supports striped drives (RAID 0). (3) You want the fastest CPU you can afford. Filters eat CPU for lunch. Dual-core may not help you much (it depends on the filter). Dual-core does help with UF, though, as do dual processors and render farm PCs.

Rick,

Celerons should be fine, your bottleneck with UF rendering is rarely memory throughput and almost always CPU/floating-point speed, and Celerons have that.

--Damien

Hi Damien,

Thank you so much for taking the time to explain this to me. I appreciate it very much.

I understand what you are saying. What you have written makes sense to me, it's like you are adding an extra step. It makes nothing but logical sense.

The one thing I would disagree with you about is color control. I have seen UF's color controls and GUI, and I have never seen the capability of Photoshop in that arena. (if I am incorrect, then UF has changed so dramatically in the past couple of months with Version Four that my head would spin. ;)) I do not see these controls in UF:

1. Selecting color (two different ways to select color, with a selection tool and by specific color and tolerance) and the ability to save color selections for bands of similar color that one can control with specific tolerance, and being able to reload these same selections later

2. Curves- enhance monocromatic contrast, enhance per channel contrast, find dark/light colors  (with the option of saving the selection to reload later)

3. Color Balance (with the option of saving the selection to reload later)

4. Channel Mixing  (with the option of saving the selection to reload later)

5. Equalizing  (with the option of saving the selection to reload later)

6. Not to mention the ninety-four Photoshop native filters, along with the third party plugins that are practically endless in scope and artistic effect.

I, too, would want to do everything I could in one place, and generate as large as possible for printing purposes (it's my printing of my work that has created this problem for me, after all), but I don't believe I can sign off on your contention about UF's control control. :)

Warmly,

Mindy

The biggest reason to do your layering in UF rather than PS is that the way you have to do it in PS is VERY clunky and odd compared to doing it in UF. In UF, you can just hold down "Control" and move your mouse in the window and the selected layer(s) moves, hold down "Shift" and move the cursor and the layer scales larger or smaller, Hold down "Alt" and the layer(s) rotate and/or hold Shift along with Control and you can stretch/skew the selected layers. With PS you have to go thru all that Edit/Transform/Scale/Rotate/Skew, etc amd "accept" the changes each time. VERY click-intensive stuff. Not to mention that layering is what UF is all about and all of your layers are in the right positions in relation to each other and you can see real-time what you are doing. To make each layer one at a time and export to PS would take a lot of time. I know because I had to do a bunch of re-stacking of layers to rebuild my "Soulseed" image when I wanted to render the egg with anti-aliasing separate from the flames. Luckily, I could just resize the flames from the composed image in UF to my final image size and then export them as .png's with transparent backgounds and they pasted into the final sized psd window in the exact positions they were in in the original composition. I DID help to be able to use the Eraser tool on the unrendered flames, though.

Making mask layers is MUCH more capable (at least at my low level of "expertise") in UF than PS because you have control over the opacity level/slope of even the tiniest areas of a layer by using Iteration or Angle coloring and the Color Density to isolate the unwanted parts. I've made a mask in PS but only by using a shape with a transparent background that I'd already made in UF first.

The color controls that PS has are very rough, gross change tools that don't allow you to change just one color or area of a fractal. They affect the entire image. With UF, you actually "paint" the fractal. UF also has many "filters" in the form of mapping transforms (spheres, planes, kaleido's, tiles, etc) and you can make many more and specifically tailored textures in UF by using one of the "Pixel" programs and one or more of the many coloring algorithms that are known to be great for texture pattern making. The filters PS uses for that stuff are all fractal-based anyhow and with UF you can make EXACTLY the texture you want and not be limited to the settings a filter has. I will say, though that the Flaming Pear "Flood" filter blows UF's "Lake" effects away at least as far as "realism". I've found a mix of the two effects, overlaying a "Laked" layer onto a "Flooded" layer,  to be pretty cool.

In the end, though, I reckon it boils down to what one is most comfortable/experienced using. Sheesh - I oughtta be a UF salesman! There's LOT's of ways to skin a......er.....fractal - lol!

And thanks, Damien, for the Celeron props - I know you already told me they would be ok but somebody on the Apo list made a crack about "celery chips". I'm sure you are more knowlegable.

Rick

Hi Rick,

I do appreciate what you're saying about working with layers and it being clunky as far as rotating, etc. I didn't even think of rotating, that would be a nightmare in PS, for sure.

I still think that the coloring controls in PS are extremely powerful--it's why it takes decades to learn Photoshop and continues to remain the most sophisticated imaging program on the market. The things you mentioned like isolating the tiniest areas of a layer or dealing with color density issues are easily (to me, anyway! g) achieved in PS. And you're right about the Flood filter, which is one of many hundreds of amazing filters you can use in Photoshop which are not compatible with UF.

Hey, however you do it, the end result is fabulous. :) You da best.

Hugs,

M

Mindy,

You are right in that UF doesn't have the same kinds of color controls that Photoshop has. I was actually thinking of that quite specifically when I said there were things PS could do that UF can't, and things UF can do that PS can't. And that's because the two programs are completely different.

With PS, what you're looking at is just a collection of pixel data. PS lets you select color ranges, boost contrast, adjust levels, etc. by working directly with that pixel data. The same thing goes for all of those filters; PS has the pixel data handy and it just manipulates it in whatever fashion you describe.

UF never treats your image as a collection of pixel data. It always treats your image as something generated mathematically. When you adjust the gradient in UF, you're tweaking the numbers that go into producing the image, and UF then recomputes the image. If you have a gradient with two separate blue ranges, you can tweak each independently in UF; in PS, this would be extremely difficult, as selecting "blue" pixels over the entire image would get areas covered by both ranges. On the other hand, editing color in a localized area in UF is done differently than in PS; for PS, you just select the area and edit away, but in UF, you have to create and use a mask for the area (not always easy).

If UF were to support all of PS's color control options, it would require a very confusing interface. The whole philosophy of working with UF is that you look at the final result, but UF retains separately all the pieces that went into assembling it. So all of those lovely color tweaks would have to appear in a list somewhere, for you to create, edit, and manage. There's never a concept of "just do this one action", because UF has to be able to re-create every action you do to reproduce an image. It is a difference in approach. You have more control over some things than you would in PS, but it's not a direct translation between the two programs.

Using PS's filters is problematic unless you're working directly at print size. A Gaussian blur with a radius of 10 pixels on a 1600x1200 has to be scaled to 50 pixels on an 8000x6000, as you know. But some effects flat-out won't scale properly. (It's possible to use effects like this in UF, too; I'm careful not to.)

I just this evening finished a new piece my wife really likes (it's in her favorite colors) and I've been sweating over certain effects for two days. In PS they would have been fairly straightforward, except for that pesky print-size issue. In UF they required me to write a custom formula for this image, which I hate to do generally, but now that it's done I know I can render at whatever size I want.

There is no one-size-fits-all. It's funny this discussion should pop up, since someone recently asked on the Apophysis list why anyone would want to put a flame into UF when Apo can edit the flame so much more directly. It's the same sort of thing: if your creative process flows down a particular path, using a particular set of tools, to have that option closed off is not acceptable. I would never encourage you to ditch PS, because your workflow doesn't support it. That's just not the way you create your art. The good news is, there are options. You may find in some circumstances you want to use layering in UF and export a PSD to PS for further tweaking. Or you may just want to treat PS alone as your canvas, and work from there. There's no "right" way, there's just "your" way. Sometimes there's more than one way to do the same thing, in which case one way might be more efficient than the other, but there's usually more to worry about than just efficiency.

Sorry for the rambling nature of this reply. I had to run out halfway through and cook dinner, so it might not be totally coherent. ;-)

--Damien

Rick,

In fairness to Photoshop, the reason it is so "difficult" to work with layers, doing basic things like moving, etc. is because Photoshop allows you to do a lot more directly over the image surface than UF does. UF doesn't have things like text, selection areas, and so on to worry about; every click inside the image can be treated directly as location control. PS has to have an interface with different "modes" where your clicks in the image are treated differently depending on what tool you have selected.

In fact this is why Frederik has resisted adding too much Photoshop-like stuff to UF (although I may be stuffing words into his mouth here). There's a point at which adding new capability means diluting what is already there. Sort of like how you can now buy a cell phone that has a built-in camera, MP3 player, movie player, video games, etc. and yet digital cameras, iPods, portable DVD players, Nintendo DS, etc. still sell amazingly well. They excel at their one thing; they focus. Strictly speaking, that cell phone/PDA may do all of those things "better", but in so doing they have to clutter their interface and that makes them harder to use.

Photoshop is incredibly powerful but that very power is part of what handicaps its interface. But it didn't start out that way; its interface and capabilities have grown over the years, and its users have grown with it. Back in the day, most of the funky effects you can now do so easily had to be done step-by-step using chops (channel operations). You had to be pretty smart to figure out how to get all that stuff done, and sometimes reproducing it was very difficult. (I did the coolest thing in a graphics program once, and then could never do it again. I'm so glad for near-infinite undo.)

I think it should be possible to duplicate the effect in FP's "Flood" using a UF formula, it's just that nobody has yet. But this illustrates another problem, that is shared by both PS and UF: some effects are so "heavy" that they dominate whatever image you put them into, and it's really distracting to see them. They also tend to become trite very quickly. (How many KPT Page Curls do you see nowadays? Thought so.) I like the occasional bit of water, but I wouldn't want to look at a gallery full of them.

--Damien

Thanks, Damien. You're pretty coherent to me. :)

Yes, it comes down to personal preferences. Like I said, UF is not my software of choice, so I am not a UF expert....even though I wholly appreciate the sophistication of the program.

Do you find that when you render huge images (whether in PS or UF) your computer gasps and splutters and cries for relief? I can't imagine I am the only one who goes through this when wanting to generate large sizes for printing purposes. I am now doing ceramic and glass tile murals for customers, and man, I need humongo sizes to do that. I have found that Genuine Fractal is a life saver to make older images that weren't rendered that large into images that are truly printable. But once again, that program, too, makes my computer groan, grunt, gasp, wheeze and it takes forever.

I am praying that the 64 bits are my answer. I simply can't continue to work like this, it's making me pop Valium.

Thanks again, Damien. :)

M

I so agree with you about the Flood filter. I like it too, but unless used wisely/sparingly, it's a cliche. The vision of a misty Julia rising from the depths of many watery surfaces will make me click off pretty fast. It should be part of an image, not the reason for being.

Mindy,

I once rendered an image that took 900 hours to render, just for a 20x15 print. Between upgrading my main workstation (3x faster) and adding a render farm (another 3x faster) I can now render the same image in just 100 hours.

Yes, my computers sputter and spasm when asked to render certain images. I have a theory about this; we explore to the limits of our patience. When we get faster computers, we never just enjoy the faster speed by doing the same kind of artwork faster; instead, we explore new things that we just didn't have the patience to deal with before. Dealing with five PCs to get one render done is not exactly my idea of convenient, but with even that render on tonight's image threatening to take thirty hours, I'm glad I have the resources available. No matter what, this art form is capable of humbling even the most bleeding-edge computers.

At least I'm not trying to render 8000x6000 flames. (Yet.)

--Damien

You're probably right. It's like living within your means, and then getting a lot more money. Do you keep living the way you did? Of course not. You raise your standard of living and spend more money, and then what you have is once again not enough. :)

Rick,

There are no dual core celerons. you will probably want to go to a Pentium D. Pentiums also have a higher cache, so the processor can store more info on the processor, and doesn't have to access the memory as much if it is doing repeditive computations.

Hi Mindy,

it's NOT true 64's are twice as fast as 32's, there are some advantages to 64 bit above 32 bit, but definately not the double speed, 64's are able to address more memory and some applications might run a little faster, but that's all to it, not to mention the fact that a lot of manufacturers still haven't written decent 64 bit drivers, I guess most of them are waiting for the next generation of MS Windows, named Vista. If you're planning to buy a faster PC, I'd advice you to wait a few months (and wear a wig or something to keep you from pulling your hair lol) and go for the next generation of the Pentium processors named Conroe. I've read sensational reports about that one, like dual core (which is more likely to make your applications run a LOT faster), 64 bit, lower heat dissipation,  uses less power, and according to the first tests they've done with it, speedwise it runs circles around everything available at the moment, and not in the last place (hey, I'm dutch :) they're going to be really cheap... The same goes for you Rick, wait for the Conroe, as far as I know UF is capable of using both processor cores, as does Photoshop, but whatever you do, apart from the fact dual core Celeron's don't exist AFAIK, leave the Celeron's alone, they're definately NOT what you want!

Pieter

Michael/Pieter - Thanks for the info! I was going to spec a Pentuim D 950. Gonna be real hard to wait because I'm really chomping at the bit since we got my wife, Joie, a new fast rig! lol The Celerons won't be for my main working rig - they will just be fast, inexpensive "drones" in my render farm. Dumb bit crunchers with nothing but Windows and UF. My current P4, 2.53GHz rig will be the "brains" of the operation. I'll link them all up with a hub and Cat5 cables in the closet of one of our spare bedrooms. I've heard of a switching box that will allow the same monitor to be used on multiple pc's and will look into that. It would be even better if I could figure out how to "auto-launch" UF upon boot - then I wouldn't have to do anything to the drones but fire them up. I've been doing some stuff at work upgrading an existing design to handle USB2.0 - mostly better cabling - and had a neat thought that it would be cool if you could get pc's to talk to each other over that bus since it can go 480MHz but I don't think it's doable from a bus management standpoint. Would be FAST, though!

Mindy/Damien - yeah, I agree about the cliche' factor with the Flood filter. I usually use it for "scenes" though I did finally dip a spiral's tootsies into one, recently. One thought I had, though, was that the artists we see here are of wildly varying skill or maybe a better word - experience - levels. Most of us have to go thru the "Flood" phase and it's sort of a "rite of passage" thing that we see and have to explore for ourselves. I think the reason you see it a lot is because new artists are coming along all the time and each gets to a point where they want to try it after seeing it. We learn it and then it later because just another tool in our belt and gets used more creeatively.  "Lake" is cool to use with the waterline WAY off screen and angled - cool effect used with fbm Glass/Turbulence or with kaleido centered off-screen.

c-ya - back to work 4 this dog!

Rick

Oh and Damien - neat idea about the more capable technology causing us to push the envelope more. I whine about how "slow" UF4 is these days but I'll bet my average layer count has gone to well over 60 these days compared to maybe 10-30 before. And I'm muddling thru the "fbm" formulas to figure out how Joe P makes the cool stuff he does and trying to get into some of Jock's ufm's, too - not to mention Painter's Traps! lol And of course my selection of values for Z-dist on the Fuji thing we rendered a while back.

Rick

I'm not positive, but i think the price per performance you will get out of a dual core pentium will be higher than a celeron. Don't go for the top model, as you pay a premium price for those. Maybe find someone with a new celeron chip, and find out render times on there.

Not to mention power use--one computer with a  dual core CPU vs. two computers with a weaker processor, I would expect the two computers to consume more power.   I don't have much faith in the Ultra Fractal network rendering code either.  Has anyone done actual benchmarks under controlled conditions?

Jock,

My network rendering for large images shows the expected speed increase when considering the relative performance of the computers in the network. I don't have the numbers for you right this minute, but I do remember specifically benchmarking the network rendering in order to verify that it was working. If you watch it, though, it sure does seem like it's erratic, and the pixels/sec numbers don't seem to correspond to the overall speed.

Of course, network rendering does not help flames.

--Damien

Quote - Hi Mindy,

it's NOT true 64's are twice as fast as 32's, there are some advantages to 64 bit above 32 bit, but definately not the double speed, 64's are able to address more memory and some applications might run a little faster, but that's all to it, not to mention the fact that a lot of manufacturers still haven't written decent 64 bit drivers, I guess most of them are waiting for the next generation of MS Windows, named Vista. If you're planning to buy a faster PC, I'd advice you to wait a few months (and wear a wig or something to keep you from pulling your hair lol) and go for the next generation of the Pentium processors named Conroe. I've read sensational reports about that one, like dual core (which is more likely to make your applications run a LOT faster), 64 bit, lower heat dissipation,  uses less power, and according to the first tests they've done with it, speedwise it runs circles around everything available at the moment, and not in the last place (hey, I'm dutch :) they're going to be really cheap... The same goes for you Rick, wait for the Conroe, as far as I know UF is capable of using both processor cores, as does Photoshop, but whatever you do, apart from the fact dual core Celeron's don't exist AFAIK, leave the Celeron's alone, they're definately NOT what you want!

Pieter

Hi Pieter,

Nice to meet you.

Thank you for the information regarding Conroe. Will this be available very soon in the States? And it is a Windows-based system? Is the pricing along the same lines? My husband agrees with you about the 64s, he said it would be the smart thing to wait until they work the inevitable bugs out. Anything else you can tell me about Conroe would be helpful, I absolutely never heard of it---which in itself means nothing, 'cuz I am not a techie type person. Just your ordinary flakey artist. ;)

Mind

Attached Link: Intel to Unveil Single Brand for New Chips

According to the latest news I've read the first Intel Conroe's (Core 2 Duo will be the official name) will be launched around June/July 2006 and it will be a perfect match for your Windows-based PC. From what I've read about them, they will be cheaper than present Pentium systems with the same speed.

Pieter

You are the best, Redshift. I greatly appreciate this. :)

Thank you SO much.

Hmmm - reports vary. I heard today from an engineer at work that the 64's - or maybe he just meant the new Windows version - was being delayed until past Christmas and that all the retailers were bummed. I don't know anything first-hand. I DID see at Intel's site today that they already have spec sheets up for them but I didn't look. I was busy adding $600 to the price of the pc I want to build/buy by deciding to go for the Pentium Extreme 955 Dual Core.

Jock - I don't know the actual render speeds but Damien and I rendered one of my pix long-distance over the 'net and I can say that a render that looked like it would take my 2.53MHz rig almost 3 weeks (and rising steadily!) took my rig, the four Athlon 2.4GHz plus his "work" pc only approx 70 hours. A pretty big jump. I saw the erratic pixels/second readings that Damien saw during the render. It seemed like the "drone" pc's would amble along for a few minutes at anywhere from 80-300 p/s and then they'd all suddenly jump to 8000-30000p/s for a couple of minutes. Don't know if that was related to web traffic or maybe the way UF might dole out and then receive rendered pixels in a "bucket brigade" fashoin? Just guessing but it sure pulled my irons out of the fire for me and is the reason I want to build a "render farm" of my own. I have this bad habit of picking variables/values that you're probably not supposed to and beating an image over the head with extra layers and masks until it says "uncle" - lol

Rick

Rick

Your talking about a single image with a render time of 3 weeks?  what resolution was that?

Jock,

I don't recall what size Rick was rendering, but I typically do 4000x or 8000x (with appropriately-sized other dimension) for print-quality images. My longest was the 900 hours I referred to earlier in the thread, and that was for a 4000x3000. My current 8000x5667 has nine more hours to go, for a total of about thirty.

It's a good thing we're not trying to render fractal animations for film quality.

--Damien

If I saw 'Remaining: 900 hours' I would start deleting some layers.  4000x3000 is 12 million pixels and 900 hours is 3.2 million seconds.  That's like 4 pixels per second. 

Jock,

Yes, that's about right--four pixels per second. The image is "Ailes", which has fBm done at each iteration, with a large number of iterations. It's the slowest fractal I've ever done, but none of the fourteen layers could be deleted without seriously affecting how it looked.

--Damien

Hi Jock - Fuji-san got rendered to 4000x6000 for a 20"x30" canvas print. I had the misfortune of deciding the "mountain" looked "perfect" with a value set for a z-dist  variable that  made the layer calculate 40000 times for each of 9 or 10 separate loops within the formula - times the number of iterations to whatever bailout I had. Or so it was explained to me. I really didn't notice it was all THAT slow when I rendered it whatever by 768 - just another "overnighter" started late. I'd used that mountain before in a seascape thing I called Vancouver Sunset that was one of the first things I ever posted here or anywhere and it had LOTS of what I thought were "rendering errors" that I spent days painting out with PSP. Weird streaks and jaggedness in the "snow". That one was only 1024x768 for wallpaper and there was nothing over the mountains that would have made it undoable. Fuji-san is a whole 'nother animal and it wasn't something I even pondered trying to do. So I messed with the formula and finally hit on the "right" setting that was actaully just the "wrong" setting if you wanted to render a decent sized copy in something a good bit less than forever - lol. Which segues all the way back, sorta, to Mindy's original post in this thread about things taking a long time. Am I good or what? lol :-)

Rick

Attached Link: Microsoft Windows XP Professional x64 Edition

Rick: the 64's you're referring to is indeed the new Windows Vista which has been delayed. However there's a 64 bit Windows XP version available, from which you can download a trial version at MS, but as I've said before, there aren't many (good) 64 bit drivers available yet and I'm not sure if UF will benefit from the 64 bits, or fall back to the good old 32 bits in which case you won't have much adavantage from the 64 bits. If you're bold enough to try it out, I'd advice you to make a dual boot, ie your 32 bit version and the new 64 bit version of XP.

(I just read this on the UltraFractal home page: A 64-bit version of Ultra Fractal is not currently planned.)

Pieter

The 64-bit processors won't really offer anything to UF, since the difference between 32-bit and 64-bit deals with integers, not the floating-point math UF uses. (Although theoretically it might improve the deepzooming support, if that were re-written for 64-bit, because deepzooming works by using lots of integers to fake a really big, precise number.)

Things that do matter are CPU speed, floating-point performance, multiple cores (which UF can use), and lots of RAM (if you're using flames). For Photoshop (Mindy's question) lots of RAM and fast disk almost matter more, because at the print sizes she's dealing with, those are the limiting factors.

--Damien

Hi Damien,

Thanks for pointing that out, the only thing I'd want to add to your story, is lots of RAM with a maximum of 4 GB for Windows 32-bit.

Pieter

Okay, this may sound like a dumbass question....but can't you flatten those layers before rendering in UF?

Mindy,

When you "render" you're asking UF to regenerate the entire image at high-res. The resulting image is automatically flattened as it's generated, unless you asked for a .PSD file, so rendering in UF doesn't require extreme amounts of memory even if you have a bazillion layers. However, UF still has to generate all the pixels for all the layers, so that's an awful lot of computation.

Remember that in UF, an image isn't just a collection of pixels; it's a collection of mathematical parameters, which are on-the-fly rendered on-screen as you work. It's like you're interactively building a set of instructions of how to make your image, and you can go back to any of the instructions and change them, and UF will rebuild your image from scratch. It is not like PS, where you proceed step-by-step, each modifying the previous step. In PS, when you save your image, you're saving the final result of all your pixel-pushing. You're not saving the step-by-step process(*). When you open parameters in UF, it's like you're going through the command history and reassembling your whole image, because that's UF's native operation. UF never manipulates pixel data directly; it's always manipulated via formula.

So no, you can't "flatten before you render" because that's something you do to pixels, not fractal formulas. UF just flattens-as-it-goes, whenever it's creating pixel data, for screen or final render.

(*) Yes, you can save your command history and use it to reconstruct your image from scratch, but that's not the primary workflow, and resizing your image doesn't automatically translate all your steps.

--Damien

I see. That would explain nine hundred hours.

It seems to me we could all use HAL. :)

I see. That would explain nine hundred hours.

It seems to me we could all use HAL. :)

I guess there's one other thing to point out, something I thought about mentioning back when we were talking about color control in UF. While it's true that UF does not have the same kinds of color control you have in Photoshop, there are still things you can do with "color adjustment layers" that allow you to globally tweak the colors of all the layers underneath them. I often use these to brighten, darken, saturate, hue-shift, or color cast entire images all at once. I had a nice write-up of it somewhere but it's not right in front of me. The basic technique is pretty simple, you just slap a layer of solid color onto an image, and choose the merge mode to obtain the desired effect. Then you adjust opacity to taste.

white + overlay = boost contrast

black + normal = darken

white + normal = wash out

(HSL: 0/128/128) + HSL Add = no change, but from here you can tweak the color to do lots of things. Change the hue = hue shift, change saturation = saturate/desaturate whole image, change the lightness = add/subtract lightness to whole image

white + difference = invert image, this also flips the hues to their opposites; combine with an HSL add layer above set to HSL 180/128/128 and you restore the hues while inverting the lightness.

solid color + hue = force entire image to one hue (reduce opacity to allow limited range of hues centered on layer's color)

solid color + color = force entire image to one hue and saturation (similar to above)

There are more combinations but these are the most important. And because it's a layer, these effects are "on top of" whatever changes are made to individual layers and gradients. It's not as versatile or precise as Photoshop's color controls, but when postwork isn't practical or desirable, it's a nice option to have.

--Damien

I would love to read the article if you should come across it!  I have often heard of this technique, but have never gotten the details.  I have, on occasion attempted to use the Darken and Lighten layers built into the presets, but they have never been satisfactory for me, they seem to just either muddy it up or wash it out.  I am really interested in having more control right in UF.  I am currently taking my images to Fireworks to brighten, contrast, add a signature and resize, then unsharp mask.  It would be easier just to resize, USM and add the signature, lol!  Mostly they seem to need the contrast boosted.

Hi Mindy,

As someone who frequently does heavy post-processing in graphics programs, I share your pain.  So I gave up cursing and ulcers and started from scratch.  I custom built a machine -- dual Pentium, 4 gigs of RAM, super quiet casing, and so on.  Now, when I work, it's a calm, almost Zen experience.

PS filters like BuzzPro and Power Retouche that once crashed my machine now zip to completion in about 15 seconds.

Although I haven't tried working at 8000x8000 as Damien noted, I have worked without trouble at 4500x6000.  And, consequently, I"ve started making some poster-sized Giclee prints.

It's not HAL -- but at least I'm no longer hearing: I'm sorry, Dave.  I'm afraid I can't do that.

Terry

Hi Terry - I'm glad to hear how that worked out for you as I'm in the process of building the same thing: Pentium 955extreme dual-core (3.46MHz), a RAID 1-0 dual SATA HD setup, same RAM but I'll be putting in a monster graphics card and , too, since - at SOME point, lol - I've got to actually play the games I've been buying and stacking up waiting for some tiny break in my fractalling. :-) I don't think the video card will matter much for most of what I do - fractals are static images and you don't care much about frame rate/throughput - but I think it might help for moving things around in big Photoshop windows(?) I notice my present rig has trouble refreshing the video when I've got something really big or with lots of layers open in UF but maybe that's just a system RAM thing(?)

Rick

Rick,

Your video card won't make a scrap of difference in how fast either Photoshop or Ultra Fractal responds, unless you purchase one made in 1995. Things getting sluggish when you have a mega-layered image is entirely due to RAM and CPU.

On the other hand, there are plenty of games that will benefit from a mongo video card, so if gaming is your thing, by all means indulge. Just watch out for those MMOs, they eat time even worse than fractals do.

--Damien

Rick,

The geeks who built my machine said a super high end vid card wouldn't make any difference for 2D imagery.  Video work and gaming, however, would be another story.  For post-processing static images, the geeks stressed dual core, as much RAM as possible (4 gigs), and (as Damien noted earlier above) a very fast disk.

Terry