(If this question's been answered before, please just cite the thread.) Here's one for the Techies: Rendering - at least in P4 - is quite slow and occasionally lethal. The process doesn't seem to use up a lot of CPU(P4 2.8)assets, and the disk-access is fairly brief. So - what's the critical element in rendering? What takes up all that time? Memory? (I've got 1 gig of 300ns DDR) Graphics card? (e-GeForce 6200 8X DDR 256Mb) Where's the bottleneck, not just in my machine, but in general? What would be the optimum balance among the various elements involved? Is a puzzlement! Fetter

Graphics card is meaningless. I've heard that Poser won't use more than 1GB of RAM (can anyone confirm?) so that's probably not the problem either. And you're processor is faster than mine, so I doubt that it's that. The only 2 other things that I can think of are the processor cache - but that's likely to be large enough if you have a P4 - and the possibility of a slow or faulty hard drive. You're not on a laptop, are you? Laptop hard drives only have an RPM of 5400, as opposed to a desktop standard of 7200 (going up to 10,000 and 15,000).

Message edited on: 09/05/2005 17:13

Just guessing, but if CPU load is only 50% then you should deactivate hyperthreading.

It's possible that P4 won't use more than 1 GB of RAM. P5 and P6 will use up to 2 GB. 2nd level cache seems to be important, at least on P5 and P6. The more the better. So probably the speed of your main memory also counts.

Give an example, what figures, props, how many, texture resolutions, lights, shadows on or off, bump maps... Maybe quite slow is the best you're likely to get for a particular scene.

I'm not sure about the 2Gb though.... I'm rendering very large scenes with 1Gb RAM, scenes which people with more the 1Gb don't seem to be able to render at all. Fast CPU, lot's of cache on the cpu and 1Gb, a good amount of HD space free and your renders should be speedy.

Dizzi, that's an interesting comment you've made, care to elaborate on it! I have a P4 with HT and my processor is 50% on Poser and 50% idle, so if you have any info to share I'd be most grateful! thefixer, poser coord.

The BIOS should provide an option to disable HT.

Thanx, didn't know that, I'll take a look!

Disabling HT won't speed up renders. Those 50% Task Manager reports are misleading. Hyperthreading works as follows: a Pentium 4 consists of several arithmetic units that can work in parallel. Now if Poser is rendering, some of those units are kept busy, and some others may be idle for short periods. In a non-hyperthreaded CPU those idle units remain idle. In a hyperthreaded CPU, those idle units get instructions from another process to execute. Overall performance of a hyperthreaded CPU is somewhat higher (5-15%, depending on the processes it must run) compared to a non-hyperthreaded CPU. And the main advantage of a hyperthreaded CPU is the better responsiveness of the system under load. Switching off HT doesn't speed up your render in any significant way. Less than 1% in my experience (yes, I've tried and timed). Switching off HT does result in a system that is much less responsive when doing heavy work (like rendering).

Thanx for that technical input Steven, much obliged!

It's my understanding that Poser 4/5/6 can only address 2GB of RAM directly, meaning physical RAM. Windows XP Pro can handle 4GB of RAM, but only 2GB goes to any running program. The same limitaion would also be under Windows XP 64, till a 64 bit version is available, since the program would be running under WOW64 emulation. This doesn't mean programs are limited to 2GB. Just like Photoshop can open a huge file; it justs means Windows can only handle 2GB chunks. The rest would be in "virtual memory", paged to your hard drive. This paging is exceptionally slow. That's my understanding anyway.

Photoshop uses scratch files, you could say Photoshop uses its own brand of virtual memory. I think this behavior dates back to the early MacOS and Windows days(OS 6/7, Win3.x) when Photoshop had to handle larger chunks than Windows or MacOS could. By the way,that 2 GB per process limit can be cranked up to 3 GB, if you use a certain switch in boot.ini. No more, since Win32 uses the address space from 3GB to 4GB for system tasks (so other processes may not use that address space). Still, the application must have been compiled to use more than 2 GB, else it won't work. On Win64, the system address space is somewhere in the last terabyte it can address, and in WOW64 a full 4 GB can be assigned to a Win32 application - if it is compiled for it. Actually, all that's required to run Poser on WOW64 with 4 GB addressble, or WinXP 32bit with 3 GB addressable is a recompile using a MS compiler and the /G switch.

Attached Link: http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/04/21/17TCamd_2.html

"Until Intel delivers its dual-core Xeon, its competitive technology remains Hyper-Threading. Hyper-Threading is an ingenious stopgap that Intel developed to boost the performance of a narrow range of applications, namely those that do their background processing via lightweight threads instead of the coarse processes that dominate software design. Neither the CPU nor the OS prevents threads from attempting to access the same resource, which makes the sloppy use of threads one of the leading enemies of software stability. But even with applications that use many threads, Hyper-Threading delivers, even by Intel estimates, a maximum of about 30 percent improvement to an applications performance. And these benefits are limited only to heavily threaded applications; Hyper-Threading does not speed up the entire system. In fact, with most systems running a mix of threads and processes, Hyper-Threading can harm performance; a scan of Intels SPEC benchmarks reveals that Xeon system vendors often disable Hyper-Threading to improve Xeons results." I suspect that Poser's ancient code wouldn't be affected much one way or another.