[Radiance-general] No more Mr. Nice Guy

[Giulio Antonutto]

welcome to the mac community :-)
MacosX is really great because you can have the best of the open source
+ commercial world... you can both use photoshop or finalcut and
radiance on the same machine...
and cinema4d as well :-)

Anyway to answer your question, developer tool GUI, gcc, make and all is
required to compile your c/c++/java... project should be included with
the machine on a separate DVD.
The material is called MACOSX DEVELOPER TOOLS.
You may want to check out also FINK that allows you to install easily
other Open Source projects (as OpenDX or MAYAVI) 

Enjoy!
Ciao
G.

PS.
You may know already but... just in case... I tell you a nice trick:
you can change priority of tasks with 'renice....'
so if it is night time you may want to render as fast as possible and
during daytime you may prefer to have a more awake system....
renice is the answer :-)
sudo renice -20 PID for full power
and renice 0 PID for default 
and renice 20 PID for slooooow execution


-----Original Message-----
From: radiance-general-bounces at radiance-online.org
[mailto:radiance-general-bounces at radiance-online.org] On Behalf Of
atelier iebele abel
Sent: 16 December 2005 15:09
To: Radiance general discussion
Subject: Re: [Radiance-general] No more Mr. Nice Guy

He Greg,

I just have a G5 for editing video my last project, and I was surprised 
how well a G5 is rendering with rpict. The G5 was one of the best 
workhorses this month!!
On my G5 the deafult processor performance is already set on  "Highest".
Besides that, removing the -DNICE= arguments in rt/ Rmakefile is 
something I like to check out, but I am fearly new with OSX, and I 
haven't found any development tools yet.
Where do I find development tools for OSX, so I can run make?

-Iebele



Greg Ward wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> This message is most relevant to Mac users, but introduces a change  
> that may affect rpict and rtrace performance in future releases on  
> all platforms.  Specifically, I have taken out the NICE= macro  
> settings from the Rmakefile in src/rt, so future builds will run all  
> Radiance programs at the standard user priority.
>
> I made a fortuitous discovery whilst playing around with the very  
> cool (no pun intended) TemperatureMonitor freeware <http:// 
> www.bresink.com/osx/TemperatureMonitor.html> on my new PowerMac G5  
> quad.  It's lots of fun to watch the processor temps go up and down  
> with load.  The funny thing I noticed was that changing the Energy  
> Savings settings had an unexpected effect on temperatures, which are  
> in turn related to power consumption and (presumably) processor  
> performance.
>
> The Energy Saver options lists three processor performance settings,  
> "Highest," "Automatic," and "Reduced."  With the machine idle, there  
> were only slight differences between the three; I had expected to see

> more, especially on the "Highest" setting...  The biggest difference  
> was between "Highest" and "Reduced" with all four processors busy,  
> and that was no surprise.  What was a surprise was that when I had  
> four rpict jobs going in parallel, there was a big difference between

> the temperatures using the "Highest" versus "Automatic" settings.   
> Apple documentation states that the performance penalty for using  
> "Automatic" should be very small, so I figured the temperature change

> would also be small.  That's when I decided to measure actual  
> performance.
>
> What a difference!  Between the "Highest" and "Automatic" settings, I

> noticed a performance difference of over 60%, where I expected to see

> little or none.  What I did expect was a performance hit moving to  
> the "Reduced" setting, which indeed there was, but it was only  
> another 13% worse than "Automatic."  This really seemed wrong to me.

> That's when I decided to start playing around with the "nice" level  
> of rpict.
>
> The "nice" setting on a process is a way to tell Unix that a job is  
> not a top priority, and interactive processes should be given more of

> the CPU if there are any running.  However, in the past, it hasn't  
> much affected the performance of a process if there are no other jobs

> to contend with.  I put nice() calls in Radiance way back when multi- 
> user Unix's were the rule, and we had to peacefully coexist with a  
> lot of other people who might get annoyed if I hogged all the system  
> resources, as Radiance is wont to do.
>
> In short, I found out that removing the nice() system call from rpict

> achieved the "Highest" performance figure even when the Energy Saver  
> processor speed was set to "Automatic."  (The "Reduced" performance  
> was not affected.)  Apparently, Mac OS X 10.4 (at least) uses the  
> process "nice" setting to decide whether or not to kick the CPU speed

> up a notch.  This might be a new feature of the OS, as I don't have  
> access to a maching running Jaguar or Panther to try it there.
>
> The bottom line in all this is that if you own a Mac and you're  
> running Radiance on it, be sure to use the "Highest" setting in the  
> Energy Saver control panel, because if you don't, your rendering  
> might just be running 60% slower than you would like it to.  Option B

> is to remove the -DNICE= arguments from the build lines in src/rt/ 
> Rmakefile and remove the affected object files (rpmain.o and  
> rtmain.o) then rerun "rmake install" in the rt directory.  Or,  
> download Saturday's HEAD release and build that.  (I think I'm too  
> late for tomorrow.)  Then, you can leave the processor performance on

> "Automatic," which is the default for normal operation.
>
> I wish I had made this discovery a couple of years ago....
>
> -Greg
>
>
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>
>

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