CompuServe Messages

Hello Heinz, >>Have you actually benchmarked a Rayman scene against the >>registered (watcom-compiled) version of Vivid, POV, or Polyray? Yes, we really have. And we tested it against Real 3D and other packages. Get a RayMan copy, test it on yourself and if you find a raytracer wich renders a scene of, let`s say 100,000 polygones, faster then RayMan, I`ll never say it`s the fastest raytracer on PC. But please run both on the same machine and the same configuration and render options. I think a Pentium with 32 megs will do the job good. (I made the tests using a Pentium/66 with 64 MB RAM and scenes from 20,000 to 250,000 polygones). Don`t get me wrong, I don`t want to blame any software. I used POV for a long time, it was my first raytracer, and I loved it very much. It`s really good and gaves us lots of ideas to implement in RayMan. But when someone says that RayMan isn`t fast than I can only say that raytracing needs of course more time than Z-Buffering. But if you compare between different raytracer you can`t say that RayMan is slow. Hey, and by the way: I think it`s more important to get all 3DS features (mappings, light settings and so on) than the point that A needs 5 second less than B to render a scene. Only when A is two times faster than B you should spend your time on making some benchmarks. Thanks. Michael