From: Mario Wolframm Newsgroups: comp.parallel.pvm,comp.graphics.rendering.raytracing Subject: Re: POVPVM Animation Date: Thu, 13 May 1999 19:11:08 +0200 Organization: Teleport Sachsen-Anhalt /RegioCom Message-Id: <373B07AB.1C8919AF@regiocom.net> References: <37319CC8.2C1F84AB@book.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Xref: ukc comp.parallel.pvm:8375 comp.graphics.rendering.raytracing:42679 Mike Shivas wrote: > Hi > > I'm running POVPVM on a heterogenous Linux cluster. I plugged the memory > leak, but now I notice that rendering animations slows the whole cluster > down to the speed of the slowest machine. In order to safely execute any > pre-frame or post-frame processing directives in the right order, povpvm > waits for the last one of the set to complete before starting the next > set. So the 233 G3 machine churns thru' frame 1 in 10 seconds, but then > sits around doing nothing while the 133 Pentium laptop with 16Mb of RAM > shows up a minute later. > > Is there any way to have POVPVM render animations the same way it > renders single frames, i.e. all CPU's working together on a single > frame? Alternatively, is there any way to have it not pause, as I'm not > doing any post or pre-frame processing? Why not split up the frame a little more? So the G3 will render 10 tiles while the laptop is buy just doing one or two. You should experiment with smaller numbers of rows I think I remember a difference between 8x64 pixels vs. 64x8 pixels. But this is more than one year ago, I don't recall exactly but for me it seemed to be very obvious when having antialiasing switched on. > > Thanks > > Mike Whats the size of the cluster anyway? Can I (we) have some feedback? ciao Mario -- If it happens once, it's a bug. If it happens twice, it's a feature. If it happens more than twice, it's a design philosophy.