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render time? these days you can go to any shopping centre and for very little money buy a gpu that can render quaternion julias in realtime: http://graphics.cs.uiuc.edu/svn/kcrane/web/project_qjulia.html

Impressive!

GPU = Graphics Processing Unit (similar to CPU = Central Processing Unit) = A videocard

Since you are viewing this forum in the first place, you already have one.

That said there are many GPU's that have much more powerful chipsets. Currently, they are used mostly for gaming, but they have gotten so powerful recently that there has been work done to port applications to use them as their primary processing engine. A GPU is basically just a really, really fat floating point processor, with an amazingly fast memory bus (and many modern high-end video cards feature 2gb+ of very fast memory), which, in fact, is perfect for rendering fractal images, as this is exactly what they do. While a CPU may be faster overall, since it also features a large instruction set capable of many different tasks, a GPU is specialized, and able to accomplish that task better.

I distinctly remember an argument I had several years ago on a forum (and I think Fredrick was there) regarding trying to port part of the Ultrafractal rendering engine to the NVidia instruction set, which, at the time was not really ready for this application, and hadn't developed far enough for this purpose. Those were still the days of the ATI bus, which did not suit this application well. In those days the only way to directly 'access' the GPU was through OpenGL, which was agreed to be totally inappropriate for this work. But today, we have PCIExpress video cards (if you bought your computer in the last 2 years you have one) and NVidia has released their chip's instruction set in a similar fashion to Intel's developer's manual, and have also released a C compiler specifically for this purpose. I believe it is time for the videocard to rise as a major auxiliary processor.

Also, modern video processors like intel's Telsa and Toshiba's Cell have appeared on the scene, wielding excessive clock speeds and insane memory bus/cache setups. There is no denying that this setup owns when it comes to rendering fractals.

hey sock, believe me, it is a really pretty animation you have there, and believe me also, that quaternion rendering on those GPU thingies works nearly only for those z 2+c mandelbrot like fractals where the so called distance estimator can be used, it is nearly impossible to do a nice quaternion rendering of a newton fractal or likewise anyhow ... or any other fractal type, ifs 3d fractals, define a surface, but it is really really hard to determine WHAT surface they actually define ... 

btw. did i mention that your animation starts out like a dna string ? 

hey lyc, for sure, but i wanted to point out especially the quaternion thing because sock did render such a thing,

and my favorite 3d fractals are for sure lsystems for trees and plants ...

 

hui, what a post


when computer guys talk about realtime they mean the result of the calculation is done in under 1/50 seconds

when you watch an animation, it is also realtime - the decoding of the video - but it is not calculating the contents
of the video, if you have a rotating box on your screen it is common to say this box rotates in real-time, if you have a
move of a rotating box, it is NOT called this is realtime,

imaginary time ? never heard of it, unreal time, never heard of it .... surreal time, never heard of it 


yes, but if you say it takes long, it is NOT realtime, you have to spell it as a single word, realtime, not real time ....

but those gpu gfx cards have a immense amount of parallel working processors ( up to 256 by now i think )
this means, each pixel in the image has its 'own' processor and they all share the same data, the main benefit is that
they work only on a very restricted memory area where no other processes interfere, e.g. hard disk access or something other
which slows down the memory access from the cpu



that is a good and fair trade comic books for a macbook, lol
 


NEVER NEVER NEVER say that again please ! i think you mean MS-DOS, DOS simply means DiskOperatingSystem ...
this system was horrible ... better say linux, the shell there is easy to use and assists you in finding files and
navigating through the system the best msdos command was for sure: "cd.." but under linux you have the tab key
like now in the winxp shell they have finally managed the filename completion through the tab ....but msdos had more
restrictions, remember the 640k border ?

 

I did state "comparable" pc vs mac.  I was in a store where my comic book collecting friend is a manager and did a straight comparison on the same usb drive with the same data - the computers were said to be comparable, but such things are not quite clear to me, I admit.  Still - the mac did out perform the pc in this regard, and a few others. So either the computers were not comparable after all, or it really does work faster...  Another Mystery!

I just wish there was a way to shut up that DANG opening chime it makes...   I leave it on eternal stand-by so I'll never have to hear that sound!  At least windows allows altering that.  I have no clue why mac thinks people will like it, or not be annoyed it!

And about DOS...

Oops.  I knew better...

See what happens when people use acronyms!  I should have said "I miss my old TI-90 Computer"

I just liked the simplicity and structure of programming.  I can't easily adjust to this new way of doing things!  I can adjust, but not easily.

I'm still used to being able to view all my source code in one place!  These new ways have snippets of code everywhere and spread out!

It may be a superior system for functionality, but I find it harder to debug. 

I'm Old, and stuck in my ways.  Trying to embrace these new stuffs...  but reluctantly!