Terragen on a quad core

[jakeythesnake]

I have a relatively new gaming laptop, it has a dandy i7 720QM which is running at 3GHz at the moment, obviously I would like to use more than one core of my CPU. I'm guessing GPU is completely irrelevant to render speeds, but I do have a fantastic ATI 5870m.

At the moment it is using 13%, obviously rounded up from 12.5%, as it has 4 cores and hyperthreading is enabled, so 8 virtual. So is that it, it doesn't support multi-core? Maybe some kind of fan-made optimisation which adds it?

I would use T2, because I know it does, but coming from TC the interface on T2 is just...whoah. I'm lost.

Oh, and side note, how does one optimise the max size of render buffers? A certain percentage of your RAM? I have 6GB at the moment, but should hopefully be buying a couple of 4GB sticks soon and will have 12 then

Thanks,

Jake

[jo]

Hi Jake,

TG Classic will only use one core for rendering. You're right that the GPU doesn't have any effect on rendering.

About your RAM question, TG Classic is a 32 bit app and that means it can only use a theoretical maximum of 4 GB of RAM. However it might be that TG Classic can only use 2 GB on Windows. Realistically though I don't think that's too much of a problem. TG Classic was written when people had a lot less RAM so 2 GB is actually a pretty hefty amount. You could easily set the render buffer size to 100 MB but I'm not sure how much difference it would make from the default.

One thing I'd like to mention is that TG2 is actually very similar to TG Classic. Sounds mad I know :-). However if you ignore the node network you'll find that you can use it in much the same way as you would Classic. You can actually do a lot without needing to touch the node network.

Let's take surface maps as an example. The Shaders view in TG2 is actually pretty similar to the Surface Map part of the Landscape window in Classic. You have a list which shows you how the surface layers are arranged. Here's how the Classic controls map to the TG2 controls (Classic on left, TG2 on right):

Classic             -->      TG2
Edit button      -->      Just click on a layer and its settings will be shown below
Add Sibling       -->      Click the Add Layer button above the list. Choose Surface Layer from the menu to get the same sort of thing as Classic.
Add Child         -->      Click the Add Child Layer button to add a child layer to the selected layer. Choose Surface Layer from the menu to get the same sort of thing as Classic.
Up button        -->      Click the Move button with the upward pointing arrow.
Down button    -->      Click the Move button with the downward pointing arrow.
Remove button -->     Select the layer and press the Delete key.

When it comes to the surface layers themselves TG2 has a lot more settings however once more it doesn't take much to see that there are some definite similarities between the two apps.

TG2 can do so much more than Classic. It is a bit more intimidating but if you ignore the node network and just stick with the things you think you recognise and leave aside the strange things for a while I think you might find there a lot of similarities between TG2 and Classic and it might be easier to get to grips with than you think.

Regards,

Jo