Why do I yearn for a faster computer? For games, that's why. Games push the limits of your machine. I could do all my word processing and HTML and web browsing on a 486, but games forced me to upgrade.
It is simply unacceptable to spend all this money on games, so I came up with a better excuse: Rendering time. I am growing old waiting for images to render on my machine, and to illustrate the time I could save by upgrading to a PII, I asked some friends to render the same file on their (fast) machines. We each rendered the file goldentime.brc in Bryce 2, by Metacreations directly to disk, 72dpi, 6.67"x5", 480x360, with spatial optimization off. These are the default settings. We each rendered the file 3 times, with anti-aliasing off, on, and fine. Here's what we found.
| System | Anti-aliasing Off |
Anti-aliasing Normal |
Anti-aliasing Fine Art |
|
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pentium 133 32 Megs RAM |
11:08 | 38:59 | 2:54:43 | |
| Pentium 200 128 Megs RAM |
4:45 | 18:54 | 1:40:30 | |
| AMD K6 200 64 Megs RAM |
5:21 | 18:44 | 1:38:00 | |
| Pentium II 233 64 Megs SDRAM |
3:07 | 12:04 | 49:08 | |
| Pentium II 233 64 Megs SDRAM Win98 |
3:03 | 12:01 | 49:32 | |
| Pentium II 233 64 Megs SDRAM NT4 |
2:58 | 11:43 | 47:25 |
As you can see, the PII 233 renders the same file in 1/3rd the time! That's significant. You may also note that the AMD K6 200 looks great, rendering at twice the speed of my P133.
I trust this speed test, because I conducted it myself. I would love to get input from other systems, especially from someone running a Macintosh. If you have Bryce2, please drop me a line and I will mail you the goldentime.brc file directly (I couldn't upload it to this server).
Rob@cockeyed.com.
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