[Radiance-general] PC hardware advice

[Mark Stock]

Bob,

With 5-10 objects and 1 or two light sources, you probably won't 
need much RAM, actually. That is, unless each object has 10^6 
triangles.

Nevertheless, I have compiled performance numbers sent in from 
many generous Radiance users at

http://mark.technolope.org/pages/rad_bench.html

I hope this helps you choose your CPU, and gives you hints for 
custom compile options.

Mark
mstock at umich.edu

On Sun, 25 Jun 2006, Robert Kentridge 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!
>
> many thanks,
>
> Bob Kentridge
> University of Durham
>
>
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