[Radiance-general] PC hardware advice

[Ian Tester]

On Sun, 25 Jun 2006 14:38:09 +0100
Robert Kentridge <robert.kentridge at durham.ac.uk> wrote:

> I'm interested in using RADIANCE for visual psychophysics. I've done a 
> little bit of experimentation with an old laptop running Linux and now 
> want to set up a dedicated RADIANCE system. The work I'm intending to 
> carry out involves producing fairly large numbers of short animations so 
> rendering speed is important but, as I don't want to spend large amounts 
> of money, I'm thinking in terms of a consumer-type PC running Linux. Am 
> I correct in assuming that rendering performance will be almost entirely 
> determined by CPU and memory? I'd be glad of recommendations 
> (specifically for using RADIANCE) about CPUs (basically Pentium 4 vs 
> Pentium D) and memory (I assume 2G is ample - my scenes only contain 5 
> or 10 objects and one or two light sources). Some PC graphics cards 
> (e.g. nVidia 6800) claim to handle more that 24 bits per pixel and hence 
> support HDR imaging - will these improve the pixel-depth of my RADIANCE 
> renders? The system will be calibrated with a spectroradiometer so we 
> really can exploit improved colour resolution if it is there to be had!

Radiance is a purely software renderer, so the ability of the graphics card
makes no difference. It's all CPU and memory. Memory is pretty cheap now,
so get a few gigs of it and you'll be happy.

I'd steer clear of the Pentium 4 - even Intel has ditched that failed
architecture. It has a very long pipeline, so any branch miss-prediction
is very expensive performance-wise. For their Pentium-M and new CPU's
Intel went back to the Pentium-III and the P6 core.

I'm an AMD fan myself, so I'd recommend an Athlon-64 or Opeteron.
I've heard that the new Intel 'Core' processors are doing pretty well,
even though they don't include the EM64T 64-bit extensions they copied
from AMD. They should do well, but definitely stay away from the Pentium 4!

bye
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