Terragen favoring hardware?

[WAS]

So, my main computer is a HP Pavilion a530n. Nothing special, Leonite2, E4500 Core 2 Duo, and a Sapphire HD 7770.

However, the PSU died on me during a render. (hopefully the fuses stopped at the PSU and not my board...). Anyways, now I have a old netbook with a Intel Atom 1.6Ghz, and a Rasberry Pi B+ 700Mhz....

Both are out performing my desktop computer be leaps and bounds besides on-screen GUI performance. For example, a highly detailed render that would have maybe 8 cells complete by waking up, would be done on either the netbook or rasberry pi... So, is there, to your knowledge anything in particular that would be causing this?



This file was not able to be rendered on my desktop because of DoF and rock detail, yet I can even quickly render a preview on both the Rasberry Pi and Atom. Is this because of newer architecture compared to 8 year old architecture?

[archonforest]

Maybe u can write more on the system specs on all. Like how much ram? 64bit? exact name of the cpus?

Otherwise newer slower systems can outperform older PCs. Even though if your old PC has more Mhz.

[WAS]

Achos A10 Intel 945G-series chipset; Atom N270 CPU, 1GB of DDR2 SDRAM RAM (32bit) Windows 7 Pro

Raberry Pi B+ with a Broadcom SoC running at 700MHz; 512MB RAM on POP soldered on top of the Broadcom chip. (32bit) Debian 6.1 (ARM Mod)

Both the above I run at default render settings, below I give 2000mb to cache, and 2 minimum threads, and 128max

HP Pavilion a6244n (mistaken on model, a520n is my older fileserver):

Intel 945G Chipset on
Motherboard Asus P5LP-LE
HP/Compaq motherboard name: Leonite2-GL8E with
Core 2 Duo E4500 (C) DC 2.2 GHz
800 MHz front side bus
Socket 775
Memory is PC2-5300 MB/sec
Type   240 pin, DDR2 SDRAM
4GB RAM

Windows 7 Pro 64-bit

[Oshyan]

Well, architecture generation (age) matters quite a lot, generally more than raw Ghz. Our Terragen 3 benchmark can illustrate that quite clearly:
http://planetside.co.uk/products/tg3-benchmark

In this specific case, the Atom should not be *faster*, but about the same speed yes:
http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Core2-Duo-E4500-vs-Intel-Atom-N270

I'd want to see a formal run of the benchmark on both machines to really be sure of the render time differences you're experiencing.

- Oshyan

[archonforest]

Hmmm...something is not right here. That 2 system should not outperform your desktop PC...