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When I try your location, I see what you mean if pertubation theory is turned on. My understanding of this theory and the way it is coded is not very deep. But I understand it uses a single point to predicts the shapes around it ... or something like that. So it might be good to know which point is picked in what way. Probably something to do with the way you zoom and where you click. For example; when you click on a blue area to zoom in ... the next view could be totaly blue. Turn off pertubation for a deeper calculation, then turn it back off to navigate faster.

Another tip is to decrease the color density or pick log color method. Maybe just a personal preference, but it allows you to see the mandelbrot set border more clearly.

Very interesting program! I'm looking forward to the future versions. Is this a collaboration between Michael Condron, Bruce Dawson, Kevin Martin and Karl Runmo? The program feels to be based on ultra fractal, is that true?

That kind of collaboration would be very nice, but this is not the case. As I put together my own implementation I simply used the know-how they made publicly available on their web sites (Michael Condron's bignum article, Bruce Dawson's 64bit ASM implementation details, Kevin Martin's paper on Superfractalthing maths and Karl Runmo's posts about his findings related to perturbation & series approximation).

The Ultra Fractal-like appearance is intentional, but the two programs are completely unrelated. I found their GUI to be quite ergonomic, so I borrowed some ideas. Their default color palette is also very beautiful.

Recently I loaded the my location Tick Tock from Kalles' collection of locations on my computer with 32 cores. The result was the following:

I now made it a serious benchmark with nothing else running and I took the average of a few runs. This makes it 1,269 seconds.

Now, with mandel machine, using 8 threads: 0,226 seconds!!!

The intuitive interface makes it easy to do very large renders with the most amazing speed, and the gradient options look very promising.

I doubt that it is only because of the use of assembler that made your Mandel Machine more than 6 times faster than mine Kalles Fraktaler.
Are you able to skip more pixels with Series Approximation? Or did you find other ways to optimize the render?

Yeah, glitch solving... I guess that's where I spent more than 90% of the time of my program.
Because even if you find the pixel with the highest iteration to use as reference, deeper locations cannot be rendered with one reference only...
I hope you can succeed with that too better than me

That was fast! Thanks.

Unfortunately, with the new version I'm getting  a different kind of hang quite frequently. Usually it happens when panning, but occasionally when zooming; the rendering freezes showing the status message "Initializing series approximation." In this condition it is still possible to save the definition file and carry on after restarting the program and loading the saved parameters.

I tried turning off series approximation, and then it hung with "Computing ..." and the progress bar about half an inch along. I haven't yet managed to trigger this with perturbation theory turned off.

(And just to prove that I'm enjoying the program as well as finding problems, here's a pretty picture: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ellarien/12477720693/)

Sure.