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Lightwave 5 benchmarking and findings

28 January 2023

A few months ago I uploaded a video to my personal YouTube channel with Lightwave ScreamerNet rendering four benchmark scenes on the X5000 running AmigaOS 4. Last couple of weeks I thought to do a comparison between different machines and I asked for help from a few good friends of mine, Dimitris "Midwan" Panokostas and Stefanos "CoolAmigan" Karousos.

Dimitris uses a few fantastic machines and is also behind the development of Amiberry, so he ran those benchmarks on his A4000 with 060 at 50 MHz, a Vampire V4 standalone running AmigaOS 3.2 and of course on a Pi400 running Amiberry 5.5.1. Stefanos is a MorphOS enthusiast using daily a Powermac Sawtooth with the PowerPC 7451 (G4) CPU at 1.6 GHz and 100 MHz bus.

From my side, I put in the test my X5000/40 clocked at 2.2 GHz running both AmigaOS 4 and MorphOS, a Powerbook A1052 with a PowerPC 7447 (G4) at 1.33 GHz running MorphOS and my beloved microA1 with a PowerPC G3 at 800 MHz running AmigaOS 4.

YouTube video

All the tests were executed from the shell, using ScreamerNet as can be seen in the video above. Lightwave 5 is a 68K application and the ScreamerNet is using floating point calculations, which means that an FPU is required. AmigaOS 4 and MorphOS execute it by using Petunia and Trance respectively, which is an emulation layer that is completely transparent to the user.

Below you will see the rendering time on all these computers in seconds. Less time is better of course, which shows which machines can be used for rendering. Of course, there are other solutions for rendering Lightwave scenes even faster, like using a rendering farm using multiple Raspberry Pis, if you can find some of them available.

|          | X5000 2.2Ghz | X5000 2.2Ghz | Powerbook  | microA1 800Mhz | PowerMac G4    | A4000/060 | Vampire V4 | Amiberry 5.5.1 |
|          | MorphOS      | AmigaOS 4    | G4 1.33GHz | AmigaOS 4      | 1.6Ghz MorphOS | MuRedox   | Standalone | Pi400          |
| -------- | ------------ | ------------ | ---------- | -------------- | -------------- | --------- | ---------- | -------------- |
| Dof      | 55           | 72           | 131        | 148            | 69             | 1457      | 648        | 64             |
| Raytrace | 443          | 649          | 1129       | 1364           | 589            | 10991     | 5692       | 569            |
| Textures | 15           | 20           | 40         | 43             | 20             | 401       | 183        | 18             |
| Zbufsort | 50           | 46           | 113        | 93             | 58             | 812       | 359        | 25             |

A few things were interesting for me based on the results:

Using the X5000 we see MorphOS being faster than AmigaOS 4, especially at the Raytrace scene where it was completed 206 seconds earlier
The rendering times between the Pi400 and the X5000 are pretty close, but the difference is huge if you consider the price tag of both systems.
The microA1 rendering times are pretty close to the Powerbook G4 times, although the second is about 66% faster.
The Vampire V4, which is the fastest and more complete of all the Vampire series, is around 350-400% times slower than the Powerbook G4, which costs much less.
The Vampire V4 is 48-55% faster than the 060

All the percentages are calculated with the following formula

% change = 100 * ((final - initial) / |initial|)

The purpose of this comparison is to understand which computer can provide the best experience working with it, without using anything else in the process. The goal is to be able to do everything on the Amiga, no matter if it is based on real 68K or a PowerPC or emulation, and get the results as fast as possible.

Of course, users' needs are not the same. I believe that everyone should use those Amiga that make them happy, fulfils their needs and makes them creative.

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