[ODE] Rendering Bottlenecks

[Jon Watte]

> Regardless of video card, the G4 processor is a very efficient RISC
> processor, belying it's 'low' clock speed', whereas Intel leverage much
> higher clock speeds :)


First: there are two kinds of software rendering; there's software 
rasterization, which is terrible; then there's software transform, which 
was the norm until a few years ago, but which still slows things down a 
bit. It's un-clear what the specifics of the systems in question actually 
use, so the question of why they have performance differences can't really 
be answered with only the information given.


However, Intel has always had impeccable memory interfaces, whereas the 
Motorola and IBM solutions have always been trailing at least a generation 
behind. So for anything working on a large data set, Intel's still likely 
to lead, even though the lower operations per clock.

PPC makes awesome ray tracing processors, though!


Cheers,

			/ h+