rnollman@maxzilla.encore.com (Richard Nollman) (05/01/91)
Recently, using FRACTINT,I generated a Mandelbrot image on my 286 clone that took 239 hours. I set the number of iterations to 1000 (for those of you who are familiar with FRACTINT). The floating point flag was turned on by FRACTINT and I do not have a math coprocessor. I told a friend about it and he was puzzled. He has a 386 and the most time a Mandelbrot image took to generate was about 14 hours and this was deep into the set (billions magnification). I saved my image on diskette and gave it to him. He generated the exact same image on his computer in about 3 hours. We surmised that the cumulative effect of many different factors accounted for the large difference in calculation times. Given the differences in our machines (shown below), does the time difference make sense? (We are trying to determine if there is something in FRACTINT that may be configured incorrectly on my machine). my 286 his 386 ------ ------- 8 mghz 33 mghz no cachex 64K cache 16-bit I/O bus 32-bit I/O bus no math coprocessor math coprocessor 249 hours to 3 hours to calculate calculate Where should I best spend my money to upgrade (best bang for buck)? Where am I losing the most processing speed? Thanks. Rich Nollman