[Radiance-general] Radiance - Mac Performance

[Randolph Fritz]

On Thursday, May 29, 2003, at 08:41  PM, Rob Guglielmetti wrote:

> Now here is a new horizon that I too am very interested in.  I read 
> with delight the tales of joy surrounding the release of the Opteron.  
> SuSE already has a 64 bit version of Linux, and I for one am unclear 
> on what that means for us Radiance people.  I'd love to hear some 
> insight about what the 64-bit movement means in terms of performance 
> for the typical rpict process. =8-)

I'd be very cautious about it, at this time.  Greg knows a lot more 
than I do, of course, but my guess is that compiling Radiance with 
64-bit integers and floats would probably show unexpected word-length 
dependencies.  Even so, I'd expect computation speeds to improve 
because of some technical aspects of the C language.

A rewrite of rholo to make use of a 64- (or even 48-) bit address space 
would also probably be interesting to experiment with.

Randolph