Project 3:

 

First off, I did all the tests using a Pentium III 500 with 128 MB of memory.

 

I used a BVH using Brandons qsplit function that he had on his web page (thanks Brandon). It worked pretty well up to one million spheres, at which point my poor, outdated computer ran out of memory and began using the hard drive. The result on performance was, of course, disastrous.

 

I used Microsoft visual studio as the development environment, and all pictures were 500x500.

 

I also notes that these times are very easy to alter drastically by selecting a different sphere layout. Spheres very close together more than doubled the time, while I could almost half the time by making them small and far apart.

Here are the timings:

100 spheres:

total time: about 3 seconds

 

1000 spheres:

Load time: 3s

Build time: 3s

Render time: 5s

Total time: 11s

 

10,000 spheres:

Load time: 8s

Build time: 8s

Render time: 14s

Total time: 30s

 

100,000 spheres:

Load time: 14s

Build time: 18s

Render time: 1min 2s

Total time: 1min 34s

 

1,000,000 spheres:

Load time: 2min 2s

Build time: 2min 28s

Render time: 7min 34s

Total time: 12min 4s

 

Here are the pictures of the different # of spheres

 

100:

 

1000:

 

10,000

 

100,000

 

1,000,000