kory@avatar.UUCP (Kory Hamzeh) (03/11/89)
I am looking into possibly upgrading/purchasing a system for developing and running ray tracers. I cuurently have a 20 Mhz 386 system with a 64K instruction cache and a 80287 clocked at 10 Mhz. It took me 17 hours to render the Utah Teapot dataset using MTV's ray tracer!! That is not acceptable. What I'm looking for is some timing from some of you kind folks out there regarding different processor/FPA combinations. The questions that I am trying to answer are: - Will spending a $1000 and getting a 20Mhz 80387 chip make a significant difference? (this is probably the easiest solution for me.) - Should I spend $1600 and get a Weitek FPA? - Should I switch processors and get a 68030/68881 combo? Simply stating that a Weitek is 20 time faster than a 287 and therefore it will cut the rendering time by a factor of 20 is not accurate. I need real life info. Please don't say "buy yourself a VAX". That's not practical: it won't fit in my den. :-) Please e-mail responses directly to me. I don't want to start a processor war. Any input would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, --kory -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Kory Hamzeh UUCP: ..!uunet!psivax!quad1!avatar!kory INTERNET: avatar!kory@quad.com
root@cca.ucsf.edu (Systems Staff) (03/15/89)
In article <110@avatar.UUCP>, kory@avatar.UUCP (Kory Hamzeh) writes:
: The questions that I am trying to answer are:
:
: - Will spending a $1000 and getting a 20Mhz 80387 chip make
: a significant difference? (this is probably the easiest
: solution for me.)
Are you talking about changing the motherboard to install the 387?
Advertised prices for 20MHz 80387s are under $500 (I found two ads
at $459 within 3 minutes after reading the above).
Thos Sumner (thos@cca.ucsf.edu) BITNET: thos@ucsfcca
(The I.G.) (...ucbvax!ucsfcgl!cca.ucsf!thos)
OS|2 -- an Operating System for puppets.
#include <disclaimer.std>