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(xaos.info)Why?

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Why yet another fractal generator?
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   We decided to make XaoS, because all fractal browsers we know needs
long time to calculate every image. You may browse nice images
generated by them but real impression from fractal--they self
similarity and possible infinite zooming into nice part of fractals can
be seen only in animation. There are many programs available that makes
nice animations but they takes long time to calculate and lots of space
on disc. Most of animations are quite ugly because their authors can't
see it without many hours of calculations.

   Natural question is: it is possible to generate such animation in
realtime? Ansver was negative for many years, since Mandelbrot set is
very computational expensive. Thinks are changing. Today's computer are
fast enought to calculate aprox. 1000 pixels per frame. It is enought
for very low resolution animation (30x30). Several programs doing that
are available. But 30x30 animation still looks quite ugly. To make
animation nice you need at least 320x200 pixels. And thats 65 times
more!  One possibility is wait until computers will be fast enought, but
it should take many years and then 320x200 animations will be obsolette
and everyone will want 1024x768 resolution instead.

   We found special algorithm that saves up to 99.98% of calculations
during zooming by reusing pixels already caluclated in previous frames.
There were some programs doing similiar trick before but we don't know
about any able to do zooming interactivly in same or higher speed than
XaoS does. Many other tricks was later implemented into XaoS to
archieve higher framerate.  Now XaoS does up to 120 frames per second
at 120Mhz pentium in fullscreen 320x200 animation and calculates at the
avearge 160 (0.24%) pixels per frame.  This makes XaoS fast enought to
archeieve primary goal--realtime animation, but there is still many
places for improvement, since more complex fractals, higher
resolutions, or slower computers still brings many problems.