#Gateway & 3ds
11 messages in this thread
I do have Dos 6, and while its a little annoying setting up
for multiple configs, once its set adding another config is pretty
easy. Its just having to reboot to use different programs is kind of
a pain in the rear. Although I have several startup configs, right
now most everything runs under one (the other ones are basically for
games). I have a scanner on it's way and I'm thinking about a
removable drive (Syquest or Bernoulli) and that's where I'm probably
going to need different setups for windows and 3ds/anipro, because of
the new drivers. Of course, I might be whining for nothing if
3ds/anipro/win/etc. will all run with about 450-475k. Anybody know?
As mass storage drives go, I mentioned in another forum how
Sony is FINALLY going to release it's portable mass storage drives,
based on it's MiniDisc technology. You may want to look into these
units.
The 2.5 inch MO's will have a 140 meg storage capacity, and
the disks will list for $20 (although I have seen the MiniDiscs sold
for $10 at the Wiz, in NYC). I think that, for $10-20 for 140 megs of
storage, this sounds like a very economical way to store animations,
BIG renderings, etc. I can't wait for the little suckers myself. Just
figured I fill you in on that.
Thanks, I'll check into it. Are these drives just meant for
storage and backup, or are they treated as another hard drive,
running at hard drive speeds, like the Syquest (14.5 ms)? An internal
unit would work fine for me, any ideas on drive prices?
Although I don't think they'll be as fast as a hard drive,
the 2.5 inch disc size should yield faster times then you'll get from
a 3.5 inch unit, and you can speed that up even more with one of the
new CD ROM cache software packages. They use a device driver, as a
regular CD ROM drive does, you just install it in your CONFIG, and
it'll look like another drive to DOS.
The initial prices list at around $1000, though that should
around $700-800 street, and should drop within the course of the
year. Even if you would pay $1000 up front, at $10-20 for 140 megs of
storage, you'll come out ahead in the long run over 3.5, 5.25, and
Syquest.
I think the first drives may be external, and may even hook up
thru the parallel port, because the primary market thrust is for
PDA's like the Newton, and Casio units, although they may market
multiple hardware configs from the onslaught. Not sure on that. I
personally want a portable to bring my files from the home machine to
an output device, as there won't be too many of these around
initially. As I said, I'm psyched on these units, and can't wait.
Hope this info helps.
It's definitely something else to check into. Thanks.
David
I have run 3DS with as little as 400K but I discovered a tremendous performance
hit below 550K base ram. If you don't care about speed of rendering and screen
redraws go ahead and run it with low base ram. I make a living at this stuff
and I need the performance. Rebooting is a small price to pay for 30-50% speed
increases on 12-24 hour rendering jobs.
I have one machine with 632K and another with 478K, and I see a very small
performance hit on the 478K machine, typically two to three seconds per frame
on a five minute frame. This is significant, but not what I would call a major
performance hit.
Regards,
John Tissavary (La Luna cie)
Hi John, just thought I'd jump on this one also. I just did some testing with
my setup. First using 469K of conventional the rendering took 4:18 then I
unloaded most of my drivers and got it up to 560K. Took 4:19 to render. I would
say conventional plays no part in rendering speed, as it actually shouldn't.
SHould it? If it should it doesn't. Oh well.
Dave Mennenoh
That's what I thought, too. I'm not sure why my workstation is a bit
slower rendering, besides peripherals its the same computer as the
other slave: AMI Enterprise III with a DX2 66. Go figure.
It just occurred to me that maybe it is a driver itself that is
causing the slowdown in rendering instead of the amount of memory it
is removing from 640.
If, when it grabbs the interrupt, it chews up a bunch of cycles, it
could impose a performance degredation.
I'm running 3ds on 514k right now but I don't think I can get
much higher than that. I have a tiga video board (chrome) that eats
48k, CD-rom taking 45k, mouse = 12k, vesa = 10k, Targa = 10k, and the
targa zaps 64k out of high along with my video setup that requires
more upper memory to be excluded. I've tried Qemm's stealth feature,
but it caused more problems than it fixed. So unless I spend some
serious time tweaking Qemm perameters, my base memory will only go
down. And until I start making money with 3ds, I can live with
certain MINOR performance hits.