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

[Gregory J. Ward]

I haven't benchmarked the "official 3.8" binaries on the G5, G4, or  
Intel as yet, but I should get around to that and post the results.   
I don't know what I might have done, offhand, to improve the  
performance over last year's entries.

-Greg

> From: Rob Guglielmetti <rpg at rumblestrip.org>
> Date: November 1, 2006 9:40:02 AM PST
>
> ...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