hey all

lets see..the question about only getting 50% cpu usage on a hyperthreaded cpu....

So the short answer is, ya need to turn off hyper-threading in the OS so it will use the whole cpu.

The long answer? A hyperthreaded cpu uses half of its processing power on one thing..and then the other half on something else. For instance, in Adobe premiere...one half can be used to work on your project while the other half is used to render the previews in the background. Thus producing no noticable slowdown while this goes on. The thing is, a program has to be written to use these. Rendering would gain nothing from being hyperthreaded.

as for the "long" renders...something interesting I have found in this version of Bryce is that premium effects rendering actually renders faster than regular..and this actually produces better results because it actually uses the material data instead of "guessing" at what color a pixel is between while antialiasing. I'd suggest always trying this...I've been really impressed with this new capability.

oh..and last, just a small thought to pass on:
...if enough people "wait for Bryce 6", there won't be a bryce 6. Think about it :)

to each his/her own tho.

:)
and I have a theory as to why some scenes take longer to render. Steve said that they concentrated on parts of the render engine for optimization. Im thinking that somewhere along the line, a variable that should be global and defined early in the render is being defined each time a material attribute is used to render a pixel color. For instance, if you render just using transparency, the speed increase exists for b55, but if you combine this with refraction (for example) it seems to slow down. Just a theory...and tho redefining a variable only takes a millisecond, when you're talking millions, or even billions of rays..that'd add up :)
BT

Message edited on: 05/04/2005 21:17