3DS vs Lightwave
Recently there's been some conversation, which I think I had something to
do with, about Lightwave 3D on the Amiga and 3D Studio on the PC. Just out
of curiosity, I went back to an Amiga World magazine I had purchased in May
1991, when I was first making decisions on which platform to choose. There
was a comparison of 4 different 3D products for the Amiga, one of which was
Lightwave 3D. For the fun of it I did my best to set up the same scene.
For the purpose of the article, they weren't using ray tracing, just
mapping, so I feel I was able to get a pretty fair comparison. I rendered
the same scene at the same resolution. He was using an Amiga 2000 with an
A2620 accelerator and I was using my 486/33. The Lightwave 3D rendering
was said to take 29 minutes, and my 3D Studio comparables took from 7 min.
19 sec. to 10 min. 51 sec. I understand there is a new release of
Lightwave and I really don't know that much about the Amiga's architecture
to know if that board is state of the art or not. I know there's a few
people with some curiosity on this issue. I got some inquiries via email.
So I thought others might find this interesting.
Roger D.