wasteland

New personal record: 16385*16385 heightmap == 536870912 triangles ~~ 536 Million Triangles, that is half a GTri, yay!

interesting: i had to boot up my box in windoze because i had to scan some sheet of paper. so i did hibernate my running session, where 'session' includes the ongoing rendition of the above image. i do my hibernation via s2disk, which, unllike tuxonice, does not pump everything back into ram after un-hibernation. so the job of paging stuff from swap back into RAM is left to the kernel.

the point now is: the above render took 2.7 GiB of my 2.0 GiB RAM, what is above is paged out into swap, actually there was 1.8 GiB in RAM, before hibernation. after un-hibernation and relaxing back, picogen was running in only 470 MB. so what I conclude is that even in this scene, where i set the size to xyz(50.0, 5.0, 50.0), only a good 1/6 of the acceleration structure is actually needed (and so paged back into RAM). what i condlude from that is that it should be highly worthful to support some kind of explicit paging directly in the AS, as Thatcher Ulrich suggested it.

when you think of it, and that 1/6 ratio is common for such scenes (but i expect even lower ratios for larger terrain) good paging should enable me to render 32^2k-heightmaps and more, resulting in 2 GiTris and more .... *buff*


edit: forgot the stats:

- 666 samples, so this is an unholy rendition (pure accident, really)
- 8 hours of rendition (including 30 minutes of quad-tree creation (itself including the sampling of the heightfunction))
- one core (Athlon XP 2200+, uh oh)