Category Archives: Fractals

Making a 4K Fractal Movie with Fractal eXtreme

Posted on January 20, 2016 by brucedawson

Four years ago I created a HD fractal movie because I wanted to see how quickly Fractal eXtreme could calculate the same movie that Orson Wang had posted to youtube. My version of his movie was antialiased and 720p and … Continue reading →

Posted in Fractals, Performance | Tagged | 13 Comments

Out of Order Benefits

Posted on October 25, 2012 by brucedawson

A few months ago I wrote about some experiments to see how fast modern CPUs are at doing high-precision math such as is used in cryptography and high-precision fractal calculations. I recently read an article that claimed that out-of-order processors … Continue reading →

Posted in Fractals, Math, Performance, Programming | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Fractal eXtreme, now cheaper

Posted on September 4, 2012 by brucedawson

As an experiment Fractal eXtreme is now just $9.95. The latest version has a few bug fixes and performance improvements, is a free update to all existing users, and is cheap like borscht.

Posted in Fractals, Math | Tagged | 24 Comments

Fractal and Crypto Performance

Posted on March 28, 2012 by brucedawson

There was some recent interest in what type of computer would run Fractal eXtreme’s deep zoom calculations fastest (and cheapest) so I wrote a benchmarking tool that isolates the inner calculations for more accurate measurements and arranged to have it … Continue reading →

Posted in Fractals, Math, Performance, Programming | Tagged , , , , , , | 24 Comments

Fractal eXtreme New Version–Better Zoom Movies

Posted on December 14, 2011 by brucedawson

While working on the Really Deep Fractal Zoom Movie – Much Faster project (240 times faster!) several updates were made to Fractal eXtreme in order to improve the creating of zoom movies. These improvements are now available as part of … Continue reading →

Posted in Fractals | 13 Comments

Really Deep Fractal Zoom Movie – Much Faster

Posted on December 4, 2011 by brucedawson

A few weeks ago while browsing YouTube for Fractal movies I came across a video that claimed to be (as of its post date of January 26, 2010) the deepest zoom movie on YouTube. The video was of an interesting … Continue reading →

Posted in Fractals, Performance | 23 Comments

Faster Fractals Again

Posted on November 28, 2011 by brucedawson

I was calculating a long fractal zoom movie with Fractal eXtreme when I noticed that one of the phases seemed to be taking too long on my four-core eight-thread processor. A bit of investigation showed that this phase was effectively … Continue reading →

Posted in Fractals, Math, Performance, Programming | 6 Comments

Then and Now–Performance Improvements

Posted on September 19, 2011 by brucedawson

In a recent post I made an offhand comment that in one fractal calculation scenario my new laptop is about 37,500 times faster than my old Amiga 1000. I suspected that in other fractal calculation scenarios the improvement is much … Continue reading →

Posted in Fractals, Math, Performance, Programming | 3 Comments

Faster Fractals Through Better Scheduling

Posted on September 7, 2011 by brucedawson

Performance improvements can come from many directions including better algorithms or micro-optimized inner loops. In this case I got a worthwhile speedup by working better with the Windows thread scheduler.

Posted in Fractals, Investigative Reporting, Performance, Programming, xperf | Tagged , | 7 Comments

Faster Fractals Through Algebra

Posted on August 13, 2011 by brucedawson

I’ve been working on Fractal eXtreme on-and-off for years, and an important (and fun) part of working on it is optimizing the calculation of the Mandelbrot set, especially the high-precision math routines that allow deep-zooming. After working on this over … Continue reading →

Posted in Fractals, Math, Programming | Tagged , | 26 Comments