[Bf-committers] Minutes bf-blender project members meeting, jan 19

Douglas Toltzman bf-committers@blender.org
Thu, 23 Jan 2003 23:06:26 -0500 (EST)


On Thu, 23 Jan 2003, John K. Walton wrote:

> On Thu, 23 Jan 2003, Kent Mein wrote:
> 
> > In reply to Douglas Toltzman (doug@oakstreetsoftware.com):
> > 
> > I would say your not going to get much in the way of performance boosts,
> > and the more Linux platforms we have the more confusing its going to be
> > for the average user.  My vote is leave specific builds up to the users
> > that want them. Whats everyone else think?
> 
> put a stake in the ground, and support only the platforms we said we
> would. then finish the build/infrastructure, so real feature development,
> or porting from evil tree can be done. else this goes on for more months.
> if more platforms need to be added, do it later.

I will do my own build and post benchmarks for anyone who may be
interested.  However, to be fair, I'm not asking to support another
platform.  The build environment for an i686 build would be the same as
the build environment for an i386 build, with the exception of the target
processor in the C/C++ compiler options.  This, of course, would be for
optimization only.  (the i486 instruction set is significantly improved
over the i386, and optimizing for the i586 and i686 pipelining can provide
some improvement in execution time)

I'll post actual benchmarks sometime, in case anyone else is interested in
maximizing render performance.  Some of our renders have to run overnight;
even when we split them across multiple 2GHz processors.

Best regards,
Douglas Toltzman