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Why Buy Fractal eXtreme?
Fractal eXtreme, by Cygnus Software,
is a fractal exploration program that draws pictures
of the Mandelbrot set and other fractals on your Windows PC (Windows XP, 32-bit Vista™, 64-bit Vista™, and other variants) and allows you
to explore these fractals by zooming and panning towards interesting
areas with your mouse or keyboard. In Fractal eXtreme, we have attempted to combine speed, power, and
simplicity with a few unique features -- all designed to make it easy
for you to discover uncharted regions of the Mandelbrot set
and many other fractals.
Fractal eXtreme was originally written to make use of multi-processor
machines so it can make full use of today's dual-core, quad-core,
and many-core systems to dramatically improve calculation speeds.
What makes Fractal eXtreme different?Point and click animated zooming is the most intuitive way of exploring fractals that we could think of. It's as easy as using a magnifying glass. Fractal eXtreme's multi-pass drawing means that even slower PCs can easily explore fractals. It lets you see an approximation of the final picture in just a fraction of a second. Even for pictures that will take several minutes to complete, you can get a good idea of what your picture will look like almost immediately. This allows you to decide quickly whether to keep zooming, or wait for the completed picture.
Fractal eXtreme has a multi-window, multi-dialog design. You can
adjust parameters and see the changes in real time as Fractal eXtreme
continues calculating. Leave as many
dialogs and fractal windows open as you want. Here we see three antialiased fractal windows,
the status window, the Julia seed control window, and the bottom right fractal window is
displaying the Julia seed location, the location of the other two windows, and a grid.
Fractal eXtreme uses hand-tuned assembly language, separately optimized for 32-bit and 64-bit processors, to ensure maximum performance. All of these features can be tested out before you buy Fractal eXtreme. Just download a copy and take it for a 15-day free trial.
Fractal eXtreme lets you calculate fractal zoom movies quickly, by calculating key frames and letting Fractal eXtreme's Movie Player create the intermediate frames at playback time. Zooom movies are very easy to create -- just choose your area, specify a file name for your zoom movie, and go! The results, crudely simulated here with this animated GIF, can be quite spectacular. And, by using the zoom movie plugin you can put spectacular zoom movies in web pages. You can also convert these zoom moviess to .AVI format, for use in multi-media and other applications. For more information on zoom movies, go here. Fractals have a reputation for being very computation intensive. This reputation is well deserved. The fastest computers in the world can be brought to their knees if you zoom in far enough. Cygnus Software has spent hundreds of hours on the very important calculation routines to ensure that they run as fast as possible. The result is that Fractal eXtreme's Mandelbrot calculation routines typically run two to three times faster than any other fractal programs we've seen. And, to make sure that you can always zoom farther in on interesting areas, Fractal eXtreme supports high-precision calculations (deep zooms) to let you zoom in to over 2,000 digits of accuracy (on most fractal types)!
Ever get lost in the Mandelbrot set? Zoomed in really far and then forget where you were? It can be quite tedious trying to find out where you are. Until now... Selecting the View Location command in Fractal eXtreme opens up a new, zoomed-out fractal window, with a box displaying your location. You can then zoom in towards the box to find out exactly how you got to where you are. To speed up calculating large areas of one colour, Fractal eXtreme offers a `Guessing' option. When this option is on, Fractal eXtreme will typically calculate pictures three times faster, or more, by avoiding calculating repetitive pixels. Just a few of the other features include: excellent online help, printing, print preview, multi-level undo, rendering of anti-aliased poster sized images using minimal memory, an informative Status window, and so on. These are some of the more significant and innovative features in Fractal eXtreme. All of these and many more, for just $9.95.
Click here to download a copy of
Fractal eXtreme for your free 15-day trial. Enjoy!
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Bringing out the details in a fractal image and making it stand out requires
careful colour selection. Fractal eXtreme's
Fractal eXtreme features an automated explore function that randomly tunnels
down into interesting parts of fractals. It's fascinating to watch, and
it looks in places that you might never go. If you use the auto-save
feature you can leave it running overnight and come back to a directory
filled with wildly different images.