About 10 years ago we were curious to see how our SGI’s stacked up against other processors in terms of rendering power. We chose a “highly complicated” scene to render with PovRay since it was available for many systems and collected the results.
We just recently re-ran the benchmark on a modern computer and you’ll notice the update at the top of the table.
Processor | Mhz | Operating Sys | Time | Pixels Per Sec | Pov Version | Date Tested |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 Intel(R) Xeon(TM) | 3400 | Ubuntu Linux w/Wine | 44s | 7971 | 3.1 | 2/08 |
DEC AlphaServer 4100 5/600 | 600 | UNIX X4.0D-11 | 2m 43s | 2151 | 3.02 | 2/98 |
Intel Pentium II Xeon | 400 | WindowsNT4 | 3m 34s | 1638 | 3.1 | 10/98 |
Intel Pentium II MMX(SCSI) | 350 | Win95 | 4m 21s | 1385 | 3.1a | 11/98 |
Intergraph TDZ2000 Pentium II | 300 | WindowsNT | 5m 1s | 1164 | ||
Indigo2 R10000 | 195 | IRIX6.2 | 5m 27s | 1070 | ||
Intel Pentium II | 233 | Win95 | 6m 25s | 911 | 3.02 | 5/98 |
PowerPC G3 | 266 | MacOS 8 | 7m 23s | 792 | ||
Pentium Pro | 200 | WinNT 4.0SP3 | 7m 57s | 733 | ||
AMD-K6 PR2-200 | 200 | Win95 | 9m 54s | 590 | ||
O2 R5000 | 180 | IRIX6.3 | 11m 37s | 503 | ||
SunUltraSparc 1 | 150 | ? | 12m 52s | 454 | ||
Indigo2 R4400 | 250 | IRIX | 13m 35s | 430 | ||
Intel Pentium | 150 | Win95 | 15m 18s | 381 | ||
Inigo2 R4400 | 200 | IRIX | 16m 36s | 351 | ||
DEC Sable | 190 | Ultrix | 18m 15s | 319 | ||
Cyrix 6×86-p166+ | 133 | Win95 | 19m 59s | 292 | ||
Cyrix 6×86-p150 | 120 | Win95 | 22m 00s | 266 | ||
SGI R4400 | 150 | IRIX | 23m 36s | 247 | ||
DEC Alpha | 150? | Ultrix | 24m 56s | 233 | ||
Intel Pentium | 75 | Win95 | 25m 40s | 227 | ||
Intel Pentium | 75 | MS-DOS | 26m 36s | 219 | ||
PowerMac604/150 | 150 | Mac 7.5 | 33m 29s | 174 | ||
SGI R4000 | 100? | IRIX | 35m 10s | 166 | ||
SGI Indy R4600 | 133 | IRIX 6.2 | 42m 7s | 138 | ||
SGI PI 4D/35 | 36 | IRIX | 55m 12s | 106 | ||
Indigo R3000 | 33? | IRIX | 1h 10m 33s | 82 | ||
Mac PowPC7100 | 66 | MacOS 7.5.1 | 1h 37m 3s | 60 | ||
Intel 486DX2 | 66 | MS-DOS | 2h 58m 20s | 32 | ||
Amiga 4000 | 25 | AmigaOS | 4h 37m 22s | 20 | ||
Cyrix 486DX | 40 | Win95 | 5h 4m 57s | 19 | ||
Cyrix 486DX | 40 | MS-DOS | 6h ?m ?s | 16 | ||
Intel 386DX | 33 | MS-DOS | 11h 27m 53s | 8 | ||
Amiga 1000 | 7.14 | Amiga | 19Days | 0.08 |
Conclusions
The results aren’t perfect since the version of PovRay we used was simply the latest version we could get at the time. Our first test was probably about 13 years ago. Yes, the Amiga 1000 really did take 19 days to render the fish.
Credit to Daniel Kramer who collected the original tests on his geocities page which is (remarkably) still preserved online if you’d like to visit.
Render Options
We used fish13.pov as our test scene to render on all the systems. Here are the command line arguments that we used for every test:
+A +W720 +H486 +Ifish13.pov +O(image).tga +L(libpath)
Every time we got a new system we try and run this test on it. If your interested in testing out your processor please let me know. You should include the results with all the approprate info to fill in the table below.