Nifelheim Tech-Blog

I am quite surprised about the cpu-power of a netbook. Years ago, I played a lot with 3D- and virtual reality pictures, i.e. rendered scenes. I used POV-Ray, a raytracing software that uses its own scene-description-language to create such images.

Between 1999 und 2001 I created a set of images called "Virtual Impressions", consisting of six images. The fifth image, "The Rising", is still my favorite, and in search for a motive for a self-made mousepad for my netbook, I decided to use that scene. Quickly, I installed POV-Ray on the netbook - more out of curiosity than out of the thought to have the scene rendered on it. After installation, I loaded the scene-file and the ini-file containing the raytracer-parameters such as resolution of resulting image, where to store the image, etc.

As I said, out of curiosity, I hit the "render scene"-button...and guess what, 44 hours later, the image was ready. 44 hours might seem quite a great amount of time, but you have to know that this scene has some complex refraction/reflection elements, as well as some complex radiosit-settings. I am totally awed by these 44 hours, because the last time I had this scene rendered, it took me a whole week, and that was on an Athlon XP-2000+ (but admittedly with quite a higher resolution, 4724 x 3543, for poster-printing).

For more (technical)  information about my netbook, read my other post and my netbook's page.

Here are the stats, the POV-Ray-Engine returned after successfully rendering the image:

Output Options
  Image resolution 1811 by 1496 (rows 1 to 1496, columns 1 to 1811).
  Output file: vi5_mousepad.tga, 24 bpp RLE Targa
  Graphic display......On  (gamma: 2.2)
  Mosaic preview.......Off
  CPU usage histogram..Off
  Continued trace......Off

Tracing Options
  Quality:  9
  Bounding boxes.......On   Bounding threshold: 5
  Light Buffer.........On
  Vista Buffer.........On   Draw Vista Buffer....Off
  Antialiasing.........On  (Method 1, Threshold 0.5, Depth 1, Jitter 1.00)
  Clock value:    0.000  (Animation off)

Scene Statistics
  Finite objects:         1421
  Infinite objects:          1
  Light sources:             1
  Total:                  1423

Render Statistics
Image Resolution 1811 x 1496

Pixels:          2711756   Samples:         2711756   Smpls/Pxl: 1.00
Rays:          203273738   Saved:          22424277   Max Level: 128/128

Ray->Shape Intersection          Tests       Succeeded  Percentage

Plane                        207277962        67067172     32.36
Sphere                       240197175       151406950     63.03
Torus                       1880062598       240283524     12.78
Torus Bound                 1880062598       289160867     15.38
Bounding Box                9454851108      3760447405     39.77
Light Buffer                 628144966       266919162     42.49
Vista Buffer                  93690661        62159935     66.35

Roots tested:             289160867   eliminated:             85261578
Calls to Noise:           240359052   Calls to DNoise:       430146937

Shadow Ray Tests:         111143903   Succeeded:              46565848
Reflected Rays:           103899116   Total Internal:          1240912
Refracted Rays:            50934807
Transmitted Rays:              9459

Radiosity samples calculated:           309400 (0.33 %)
Radiosity samples reused:             94882995

Smallest Alloc:                  18 bytes
Largest  Alloc:               38416 bytes
Peak memory used:          49294793 bytes
Total Scene Processing Times
  Parse Time:    0 hours  0 minutes  0 seconds (0 seconds)
  Photon Time:   0 hours  0 minutes  0 seconds (0 seconds)
  Render Time:  44 hours  2 minutes 27 seconds (158547 seconds)
  Total Time:   44 hours  2 minutes 27 seconds (158547 seconds)
CPU time used: kernel 79.20 seconds, user 158269.66 seconds,
    total 158348.86 seconds
Render averaged 17.11 PPS over 2709256 pixels

The resulting image is this:

Of course this jpeg-image is smoothed and the lettering has been added only for this blog, the original image is sharp and not disturbed by the word "nifelheim". I hope you understand that I did this to protect my copyright on the image.