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Wow! This is great news. I haven't been keeping on the forums much for awhile, but I do use several fractal generating programs and have been using mandelbulber and enjoying it very much - thank you very much - and would be happy to do a little trialling even of beta software, I am familiar with the 1.21 interface using GTK but I run it on a much newer machine (recent purchase a nice core i7 2GHz, 4Gb Ram and Nvidia GT720 graphics card) so I have been really putting it through it's paces (sadly I do still use Windows 8, but I can test the software on an older XP laptop as well as an AMD machine I have on the kitchen table - I know - I have no life!)

 But if I may be able to provide some feedback, and try out the software on various systems it could be some small return for the wonderful you and others have done making this great stuff, and it has been simply amazing to go from a pentium M to a full-on core i7 and test graphics cards really putting them to some use (rather than just gaming, though nothing against gaming either).

 I don't know how the Qt interface change will affect how it renders the UI under Win 8, but I'd be happy to poke around a bit with testing if it can be of any help.

 I'm not really great artistically, I'm usually more interested in exploration of 3D slices of Quaternions, so I usually am interested in developing fly-throughs of interesting features. Also I don't really understand about getting GPU performance settings right, nor what is OpenCL (vs OpenGL?) so I hope to learn something along the way. I do have some background in computing but it has been a long while since I actually wrote any code, and that was mainly for analysis, not graphics as such.

 Anyway, I am sure there are probably already heaps of people happy to help, but I will definitely be interested to follow how the project goes!

 Once again many thanks for the software, it is greatly appreciated.
 

 Mihaly K.

Hi

I' ve tried this version and it works well (still some bugs but usuable)

I ve also tried to pass some arguments to g++ @ compilation and my conclusions are :

- gcc versions 4.9 makes more optimized code
- compiling using flags like "march=core-avx-i" & "-O3" for i3/i5/i7 2nd/3rd generation make rendering 2 or 3x faster than without !

there is also a flag for 4th generation using AVX2 instructions but I haven't this sort of CPU for testing ...

Hello,

I got best results with this CXXFLAGS:

QMAKE_CXXFLAGS += -march=native -Ofast
#              |            |
#              |            ------ Optimization for fast executing code (includes -O3 and -ffast-math)
#              |
#              -------------------- turns on system-dependent optimization

I am using an Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3770 CPU @ 3.40GHz.

The default image (Mandelbulb 800 * 600) renders in 3,72
Compared to 4,63s with the current settings. (~20% saving)

Here is more info about optimizing compiler flags in the gcc doc:

https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-4.9.1/gcc/Optimize-Options.html#Optimize-Options

That's probably still suboptimal and compiling takes forever (even with make -j).

would it make sense to distribute source code with something like march=native since people building from source will be doing it for their own computers and anyone making builds to distribute will know not to use march?  also i wonder if it might be worth making available different windows builds for different cpus if the performance difference is noticeable enough?  another thing i have wondered is if supporting something like intel's math kernel library would make any noticeable performance difference?  the intel math kernel library is supposed to have some specially optimized cvector routines and trig routines and stuff. after a quick search it looks like amd has their own thing called the amd core math library.

Hello

I 'm using a 64 bit windows version for weeks without problems (32 bits version is limited to 3 Go of RAM and it crash (seems it doesn't use swap) , only the 64 bits version can make very large size of fractals)

I have downlaoded a precompiled version of QT5 64 bits and recompiled libpng & libz under 64 bits, the whole thing with mingw 64bits.

i m using qtcreator (the "official" version, and add external compiler and the previous downloaded qt path)

links :

http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw-w64/
http://www.winkde.org/pub/kde/ports/win32/emerge/  --> the are many ways to compile libpng, i use it becuse i think it's very easy
http://sourceforge.net/projects/qtx64/files/qt-x64/5.3.1/mingw-4.8/seh/ --> for x64, prefer a "seh" version, not sjlj

the only problem that i have, is that i need to declare all the environnement of QT (not compiled in static mode ??) to work each time (bat file), like this :

Hi  lukesleftleg

it seems you have to install QT framework for now :

http://download.qt-project.org/official_releases/qt/5.3/5.3.1/qt-opensource-windows-x86-mingw482_opengl-5.3.1.exe

relaunch mandelbulber.exe and it should work

me 2!