[Radiance-general] The sub-4K second benchmark barrier...

[Rob Guglielmetti]

...has been broken!

That's right, people.  One of the beloved render farm machines at my 
office just turned in a sub-4K second timing on the Mark Stock Radiance 
benchmark scene.  SSSssssssss!

What's interesting to note is that there are subtle differences in cpu 
speed, even among the same cpu model.  I assume this is due to different 
voltage settings on the motherboards, but I'm not positive.  I also 
wonder how much of the speedup is attributable to the use of the new 
official release of Radiance 3.8.  Another interesting thing is that 
three of four benchmarks had the same exact number of rays traced.  I 
find this a little odd. 

I was hoping Greg and maybe Ferdinand (builder and maintainer of my 
office's render farm systems) could weigh in on this.  I have a couple 
other benchmark timings and stats to add to the site 
(http://mark.technolope.org/pages/rad_bench.html) as well, I was hoping 
others have installed the official 3.8 and were doing similar testing.

Happy benchmarking.

- Rob