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Prima Luce II

A new dawn of rendering hardware

This is the first published video that was generated on the new Core i7-980X system.

When the system finally came together and had all the necessary software installed, the obvious question arose of what fractal video project to make first with this new computing monster. The answer quickly became equally obvious -- a high-definition remake of Prima Luce! That was the first project to be rendered with the previous Core2-quad system, so it was a natural choice for this system too. From a computational standpoint, this animation is fairly easy to render, since it is located way off in the very sparse western antenna part of the set, where the majority of the pixels take only a few iterations to calculate.

Sample Frames

Comments

Title

The name of this animation is Latin for "first dawn" (thanks to Uma Kundu for the suggestion). It refers to the phrase astronomers use for the first time they look at the night sky with a new telescope -- "first light" (unfortunately the Latin for that is the name of a brand of cheap cigarettes).

Calculation Times

The six-core 980X took about 6 hours to render this 1600x900 animation. For comparison, the previous 640x480 version of Prima Luce took 8 hours on the quad-core Core2 system. That works out to 4.7 times as many pixels rendered in 3/4 as much time, or about 6 times the throughput as the previous system. That includes speed improvements in the software (like the port to 64-bit arithmetic code) as well as hardware. More detailed performance data on the new system is here.

Coloring

The previous version of this animation was rendered with the escape threshold radius set at 60000, which allows very smooth gradients to be drawn in the background. For this remake, I wanted to have a different look, so I rendered it with the escape radius set to 4. That gives some prominence to the transitions between different count values (some people call these "dwell bands") and gives the background a curvaceous texture that I find very appealing visually. The actual color palette is exactly the same as the original Prima Luce; it is just mapped onto a very different set of fractal data.