Mephisto, I too just started out using Chaotica migrating from a 32bit fractal program called Fr0st. It is prior to apo. My interest in Chaotica comes from having a 8"x10" (US) photobook project that uses a few flame3 fractals that were "developed" in fr0st, with fr0st being capable of rendering up to 2100x3000 which is a 7"x10"-300dpi, 6.3 megapixel file after about 3hrs, 2 Gb memory and 100% cpu usage on a i7-NUC. All book publishers (at least in the US) require a minimum of 200 dpi, with 300 dpi being the best at proofing the finished book. I needed a 19"x14.75"-300dpi (US) book cover photo in which I was going to use a flame3 fractal file. The problem that I ran into was I needed to make the photo a 35"x25"- 400dpi, (14000x10000) render to be able to crop 1/3 of the render to get to the details that I wanted without loss of resolution. The rendered file size was 140meg. fr0st would not even accept the higher res values.
Looking on the Internet came up with a number of fractal progs, but the sticking point was previously developed factals on fr0st flame3, not all "modern" fractal programs imported flame3 developed files. Apophysis 7X was a free download but ultimately a paid for program. I tried jwildfire, both free and paid for ($20 US), and found it would import and the render times were the same as fr0st. I found a lot of "definition" lost on the import and their anti-alaising problematic and did not want to "get lost" in their playground from having too much fun trying to regain the lost definition. I tried Chaotica and found no loss of definition when they opened in the "free" version thumb nail renders, so I paid for the version 2.0 unlimited.
Using it only for a few days, it is as above, leave it run and anything above the SL level of 12.5 "looks" okay. As an example of that, it took about 5.5 hrs to render a 2100x3000, 10000 interations, SL unchecked (unlimited running), AA level 2 and "strong" on the AA mode setting to get a very, very nice 7x10 - 300 dpi render on my anemic Intel i7-7567U-NUC with 32 Gb memory. The very, very nice comes from printing out the 7X10 .PNG file on a $50 (US) HP office printer with HP photopapers, with the fine lines of spirals and elipses having no AA artifacts. The Chaotic renderer showed a SL 12.45 when I paused the render for saving the image to PNG and when using the 200% zoom, no jaggy lines showed on the monitor, so there renderer seems pretty good. Through out that render the CPU with 2C\2T-4cores ran at 100% CPU usuage, but memory usuage was under 1 Gb with a 10meg .PNG file size.
As a test with the Chaotic unlimited version that I purchased, I was able to put the 14000x10000 with the same render settings, which it took, but CPU went to 100% usage and it was using 29GB of memory! After 20 minutes I got a couple of "dots" on the screen for the first render process. I think I will have to put my computer out in the garage and come back in a week or so to see how far it got, lol.
I will be looking to build a new comp system to be able to render some of my other files for the larger prints, but looking thru some of the forum questions, not a lot out there on what shape of the system will take. I am thinking 16 cores/16T, 32 GB memory, with a higher end GPU (Tesla or Quattro) for rendering, similar to an Autocad workstation. I am not really worried about the render times, maybe a better system than mine with a GPU could take a lot less time, but I am looking to print photos of rendered fractal images, so its quality over quantity.
Hope this helps for real world answers.
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