Been running some renders recently in vue5 and i noticed that cpu usage was at 50%, obviously not what is best for speed of render so i decided to change HT in bios to see if it made a change. Scene with HTT: 440s Scene No HTT: 398s 10% gain - also shows cpu usage at 100% which makes me happy as its money well spent! running 2x2.8ghz 800mhz @3.0ghz + 2gb ram hope this helps anyone with the same problem! Max

So, if I understand right, HT = hyper-threaading, right? And turning it off speeded things up? Or what do I not understand? Heck, I can't even understand why my P4 3.6ghz processor shows up as 2 CPUs in Vue AND shows as 2 components in the device list.

Hyperthreading is a total joke when it comes to rendering or any other computationally rigorous application. Unless you have an application that is perfectly optimized for HT, you will not see a performance gain, and in most cases you will see a performance decline as illustrated by Max3DD3. Best to turn it off in the bios as see for yourself. The reason your P4 shows up as 2 cpu's is that HT is turned on, which is a software gimmick that makes the OS think that there is 2 cpus, when in actuality there is only one.

Thanks, dburdick. I guess I'll need to do a benchmark. I suppose it would be silly to think disabling HT would have any effect on the amount of memory the OS uses (I have 4 gb installed).

Well HT you have two bars one is the chip kernal which deals with task alocation and the other bar is your core usage, HT is great for windows makes things load much faster but when it comes to rendering best to turn it off or for endcoding for that matter.

Hyperthreading is good for single CPU PCs as you get system resources back for doing secondary work when a render or other CPU intensive operation is happening. Vue 5 Infinite is the only Vue version that can handle more than 2 CPUs. If you have a dual and include Hyperthreading you will in effect have 4 CPUs. This is no good for Vue 5 Esprit or Vue 5 Studio.

sacada is right. One of my PCs is also a Dual Xeon 2.8 GHz, and it is very well suited to rendering in Vue Infinite (see http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?ForumID=12368&Form.ShowMessage=2188668). However, Vue 5 esprit / studio is NOT a good match for a Dual Xeon config (some of the CPU power is not used).