QuickMAN - Fast Mandelbrot Generator / News: Recent posts

Release Notes:

• Improved performance of AVX-FMA, AVX-FMA-4, and AVX-512 iteration algorithms: 5% to 20%+ faster than QuickMAN 2.0, depending on CPU.
• Pan and zoom rates for logfile images now use the current slider values (instead of quickman.cfg values) if not explicitly set in logfile.
• 32-bit integers for configuration settings can now be specified as four individual bytes if desired.
• Fixed out of memory error if quickman.cfg was missing.
• Fixed slideshow stopping if duration elapsed before a zoom finished.... read more

After 15+ years QuickMAN finally gets an update...

Release Notes:

• Added AVX, AVX-FMA, AVX-FMA-4, and AVX-512 iteration algorithms; can be two to five times faster than the SSE/SSE2 algorithms in QuickMAN 1.x.
• Added x87 algorithm for extended precision iteration; allows zooming in about 1000 times farther than double before precision loss sets in.
• Added SSE3 algorithm for Normalized rendering; it's now about as fast as Standard.
• Coordinates and magnification are now displayed and logged in extended precision.
• Now supports up to 64 threads (can be increased further by changing a compile-time constant).
• Added Slideshow and Resize functions.
• Added All-Monitors and Clipped-All-Monitors fullscreen modes.
• Added automatic Save filename generation (unique filename per logfile and image).
• Added Total time and CPU brand string to the control window info area; useful for benchmarking.
• GUI is now high-DPI aware; scales cleanly with desktop scaling and when moved between monitors with different DPI settings.
• Added several new logfile settings to tweak performance and enhance functionality.
• Did general code restructuring to reduce overhead.
• Updated to avoid use of legacy and deprecated Windows API functions.
• Made various cosmetic and functional updates.
• Now compiled with Microsoft Visual Studio 2022 Community (free for individuals; also free for organizations if used for open source development).
• Now has both an Installer (.msi file) and a Portable version (.zip file).
• Full version now requires 64-bit Windows 10.1607 or above. 32-bit and/or Windows 7 compatible versions can still be built but with reduced feature support; see documentation.

The QuickMAN fast Mandelbrot generator can now save images in the PNG format, which provides lossless compression and is recognized by most web browsers and image viewers. Whenever you have a pleasing image in the window, click the Save Image button to save a copy.

You can also save the image at an arbitrary size. It will be the same image that's in the window, just higher (or lower) resolution. Or, optionally, you can change the aspect ratio to be different from that of the window image. ... read more

The QuickMAN fast Mandelbrot generator now includes the Normalized Iteration Count algorithm as a rendering option; this algorithm greatly improves the quality of many images by replacing bands of color with smooth gradients. See the Screenshots page for some examples. For background on the algorithm, see the Wikipedia entry on the Mandelbrot set.

There's a new Rendering dropdown box that allows you to select either the Normalized or Standard (color band) rendering methods. ... read more

The QuickMAN fast Mandelbrot fractal generator really needed a palette update. It's been stuck with basically the same set of palettes ever since the first version, and only a few of those were nice. I've tried to address that in this release.

The first palette to go was the old Ugly palette, which has been replaced with a nice Monochrome. The next was Murky, which I don't think has ever made it into a single saved image; it's now history, replaced with a new Dreamy palette. There are also new and improved versions of Earthy and Loud. I think all four of these are vast improvements over the originals. You can see some examples on the Screenshots page, and in the most recent images from quickman.log and auto_panzoom.log.... read more

This minor release adds finally adds fullscreen mode. Click the Fullscreen button or press 'F' and you'll get a whole screen full of Mandelbrot imagery, without any annoying windows, icons, or taskbars to distract you.

By default the control window is hidden in fullscreen mode. You can toggle it on or off by pressing 'C'. To make fullscreen navigation easier, there are some new hotkeys: 'N' and 'P' perform the functions of the Next and Previous buttons for moving through logfile images, and 'H' goes to the home image. These keys also work in non-fullscreen mode.... read more

With dual and quad-core CPUs the norm these days, I felt the time had come to finally update the QuickMAN Mandelbrot generator to take advantage of them. Massive performance increases seemed possible with only a little bit of effort.

That's how it turned out- performance is now pretty much proportional to the number of CPU cores in your machine. On a dual-CPU Opteron 280 system (four total cores), the speedup is about 3.9x compared to previous versions...... read more

This version of QuickMAN adds Buddhabrot image generation, a rendering technique discovered by Melinda Green. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhabrot for more information.

This was my first stab at it and it's very incomplete- it needs more user control over counter-to-color mapping, iteration point selection, oversampling, etc. I think a whole new dialog box will be needed. Unfortunately I haven't been able to work on QuickMAN much recently; maybe someone else can have a go at it...... read more

If you've been looking for an excuse to get a faster computer, this may be it. The QuickMAN fast Mandelbrot image generator now includes realtime zooming, a brutally CPU-intensive operation that can always benefit from more speed.

You control the zooming by pointing to an interesting area with the new "Z pointer" cursor and holding down the left or right mouse button to zoom in or out. While zooming, you can move the mouse around to change the zoom point, hold down the spacebar temporarily to drag the image to a new position, and change the maximum iterations with the mousewheel to make speed/quality tradeoffs on the fly.... read more

The QuickMAN fast Mandelbrot image generator has an all-new panning algorithm for v0.8. The new algorithm eliminates a costly memory copy operation that was previously done every frame. The result is a large speed increase- 30-70% faster than v0.75 for most images. My Athlon 64 4000+ system can now reach 100 frames per second at an image size of 1600 x 1140.

The only panning overhead remaining is the screen update. Since the code should now be close to optimal, finally, I can move on to other features... the new algorithm really made my head spin so I'm happy to be done with it. :)... read more

The QuickMAN fast Mandelbrot image generator's panning algorithm has been improved; it's now about twice as fast as the v0.7 algorithm for most images. Panning a 1600 x 1140 image, a sluggish operation in v0.7, now occurs with satisfying speed.

The default panning mode has been changed to Smooth (the Fast mode had become too fast). While in Smooth mode you can temporarily go to Fast mode by holding down the CTRL key. ... read more

The QuickMAN fast Mandelbrot image generator now includes realtime panning- on fast computers, you can navigate large, highly complex images in realtime using the arrow keys, or drag images to a new position using the mouse.

v0.7 also adds auto-precision mode. This feature automatically selects the fastest calculation precision that yields a quality image. Surf with confidence, knowing that you're always getting the maximum speed possible. ... read more

The QuickMAN fast Mandelbrot image generator now has an improved single-precision (SSE) algorithm for AMD CPUs- it reaches 1 Gig Iters/sec on the Athlon 64 FX-57.

Any Pentium 4 above 3.2 GHz should also break this barrier. If you have such a CPU, please send in your benchmark...

This release also fixes some bugs and useability issues.