Does anyone know if there would be significant render speed / memory handling improvements in P7 with quad core versus dual core ?

Yes it should, the renderer says in the preferences screen that it is allowed to split into four threads.  Even with my dual core I can see it pegging both cores, single-threaded Poser 6 never touched the second core.  Note also that the Intel quad core QX6700 has a tremendous frontside bus, and you will benefit from that a lot as well as the extra cores (I am going the same road around maybe 2 weeks from now).

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16819115011

Memory handling has nothing to do with processor type, that won't affect you.

For 2/3rds of that price you can get the dual core athlon 5000+ computer.. the entire system.

It's like $950 shipped, and has a $50 rebate plus you get windows vista upgraded fo free.

I seeing outstanding render speed here with it. I can render a standard window with everything on in less then a minute.

If you choose to get that system, best current "buys" are also geta a 500 wat power supply to replace the base HP one, and a ati x1950 pro 256 meg video card. (about $200 after it's $30 rebate)

Thanks for the link pjz99.  Even though its sort of a high premium at this point and it may take up to another 1-2 years for programmers to take full advantage of that many cores, futuring-proofing a PC definately has its advantages.

Keep an eye on the price, because yesterday it showed 1199 for some fruity reason, I guess they had it wrong and locked it because I couldn't order it ;)

I fully expect that thing to go down 300-400 bucks in the next month once non-Extreme Edition quad cores come out.  It won't take years, it will be useful immediately in the same way dual core procs are - particularly for rendering, check out some benchmarks:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=quad+core+benchmark+rendering

How is the memory usage for P7 on a multicore cpu, is it still limited to 1.5 gig?

Memory speed shouldn't matter as much as in the raw processing of the chip.  While I love my X2 if I was buying a new box right now I'd look at a core 2 duo or the quad core, well its' 2 c2d cores glued together but thats another debate for another time, one depending on your budget.  

Here's a breakdown on DDR2 speeds to cost and what would be best in particular builds
http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.aspx?catid=28&threadid=1966035&enterthread=y

Quote - Memory speed shouldn't matter as much as in the raw processing of the chip.  While I love my X2 if I was buying a new box right now I'd look at a core 2 duo or the quad core, well its' 2 c2d cores glued together but thats another debate for another time, one depending on your budget.  

That's exactly what I've heard about the new quad core CPU, it's a 2x2 cores and not a true quad core, may be a while before Intel introduce a true quad core CPU.

So if the raw processing speed of the CPU matters, what about the Pentium 4 3.0 Ghz and above?
Does overclocking of CPU helps?

What about the performance of video cards, do they matter in regards to the rendering speed?

Let's pretend for half a second that cinebench is sorta a good indicator of how a system might perform with the firefly multithreaded renderer.  An E6400 overclocked to 3.6 is right below a QX6700 at stock.  It was like 1107 pts vs 1397 pts I belive (this was on dfi-street).  My current Opteron 170 @ 2.6 = 717 pts.

An e6400 setup might run you 700-800 bones theres about depending on how much you want to pirate from your old system.

The multithreading of the renderer was worth the upgrade price, considering I am too lazy to put my scenes in another software :D. 

I guess to summarize.  A e6400 system is a worthy upgrade for poser if you got the cash especially if you OC the crap outta it.

-G

Ghostwolf,

A P4 @ 3.0 is roughly 1/2 slower than an X2 @ 2.4-2.6 theres abouts. (I tested a northwood 3.2 and it got like 298 pts on cinebench).

I would look at a C2D system for an upgrade is performance is getting you down.

With a dual core my render time is roughly 1.86 times faster.

Also, it seems that even if you have dual core set your renderer to 4 threads even if you don't have 4 cores.  Anyone else have similiar findings?  2-4 threads that is.

EDIT: Anyone have a python script to report render times?  That would be super helpful.

Does anyone know if P7 will take advantage of an hyperthreading pentium 4?  Also, will P7 run on a 64 OS like vista?

P7 will run in a 64 bit os, but it runs in 32 bit mode.

Most multi-threaded 3D programs can take advantage of a hyperthreaded P4. Whether Poser7 can remains to be seen. Carrara 5 Pro runs two threads on a P4, and uses 100% of the CPU in the process. I'm surely hoping that Poser 7 does the same.

I hope so... if anyone out there gets a chance please post.  I'm tired of only half my chip running.

i am running p7 on a 64x2 4800 with xp 64 and it is very fast and has not choked on
images that are huge.  it uses 100% of the dual core processors...this should be opening doors for more complex renders all around. 

Quote - For 2/3rds of that price you can get the dual core athlon 5000+ computer.. the entire system.

It's like $950 shipped, and has a $50 rebate plus you get windows vista upgraded fo free.

I seeing outstanding render speed here with it. I can render a standard window with everything on in less then a minute.

If you choose to get that system, best current "buys" are also geta a 500 wat power supply to replace the base HP one, and a ati x1950 pro 256 meg video card. (about $200 after it's $30 rebate)

That's my question...is there some tangible advantage of Intel dual core over an AMD dual core? In the past, Poser has usually shown better time trials on AMD than Intel. If a "dual core is a dual core," what contra-indications would remain for chosing AMD?

Also, is there an AMD quad?

Also, since "four" seems to be the Poser upper limit now, what about a motherboard which sockets two AMD dual core processors to give you four threads. Any objections to that?

I also want to throw in the mix that the front side bus has also always had a great impact on Poser, that was shown in many time trials over the past three years on these boards. Unknown if that is still the case, but why would it not be?

So what is the untilmate drive train?

::::: Opera :::::

Attached Link: Specs and pricing on AMD and Intel processors at Tiger Direct

In either case, AMD or INTEL, can two of these dual core processors socket into a motherboard.

(Going to need a mother of a cooling system and a huge power supply)

The amount of memory your software is allowed to address is determined by operating system and the software itself, not so much the processor.  All modern Intel offerings adhere to the "EM64T" standard, which will ALLOW them to run on a 64-bit operating system, but until you make that change and you switch to 64-bit versions of application software, it runs in 32-bit mode when running software that is written in 32-bit instructions. 

Poser 7 unfortunately doesn't offer a 64-bit version ... but Vue does!

What tangible advantage over X vs. Y processor?  Check benchmarks in the link above.  It is very organic and changes month to month, who is the "best".  I stick to Intel for basically religious reasons.  People who are AMD fans are either taking advantage of their lower cost, or they are also there for religious reasons.  There isn't an easy way to look at the numbers any more and say "oh, this one has a higher clock speed" or "oh, that one has more bits" or whatnot.  It's too complex.  Benchmarking is the only thing you can even remotely trust, and even then you have to look at the parameters of the benchmark pretty hard to get some idea if it was a fair test.  Some processors do better in Application X, while Application Y will do better on the other brand's processors.

Do yourself a favor and filter out all the game performance stats.  They are meaningless when it comes to heavier applications like Poser and Vue and 3ds Max, they just don't have much to do with each other - this is why you see hard core gamers saying dual- and quad-core processors are useless, because they don't benefit games all that much (single-threaded).

re: your last post, go check benchmarks and find out :)

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=quad+core+benchmark+rendering

pjz in addition to what you said, we have been doing 'strictly poser' benchmarks here for years. Jim Burton posted a .pz3 using only default objects and materials, one for Poser 5 and then another when Poser 6 came out. Those are the benchmarks I am referring to.

We ought to do the same for Poser 7.

::::: Opera :::::

There is a Poser 6 benchmark page on my site (http://renderfred.free.fr/poser_benchmark.html), and I intend to do a Poser 7 benchmark page soon (you'll see quad and dual core scores there).

Cool, that's very useful :)

thanks louguet, that's perfect

Louguet your benchmark list is pretty cool, but I recommend you nail down specific Firefly settings;  Auto may throw some people off I'd think.

If you have your sample scene out for download somewhere I can volunteer my own stats.

Quote - > Quote - For 2/3rds of that price you can get the dual core athlon 5000+ computer.. the entire system.

It's like $950 shipped, and has a $50 rebate plus you get windows vista upgraded fo free.

I seeing outstanding render speed here with it. I can render a standard window with everything on in less then a minute.

If you choose to get that system, best current "buys" are also geta a 500 wat power supply to replace the base HP one, and a ati x1950 pro 256 meg video card. (about $200 after it's $30 rebate)

 

That's my question...is there some tangible advantage of Intel dual core over an AMD dual core? In the past, Poser has usually shown better time trials on AMD than Intel. If a "dual core is a dual core," what contra-indications would remain for chosing AMD?

Also, is there an AMD quad?

Also, since "four" seems to be the Poser upper limit now, what about a motherboard which sockets two AMD dual core processors to give you four threads. Any objections to that?

I also want to throw in the mix that the front side bus has also always had a great impact on Poser, that was shown in many time trials over the past three years on these boards. Unknown if that is still the case, but why would it not be?

So what is the untilmate drive train?

::::: Opera :::::

The new (weill it was new a couple of months ago) Intel Core 2 Duo dual core chips are significantly faster and more importantly very cool running.  Thus allowing them to over clock to an insane level.  I may be wrong in this, but I believe that windows XP will only allow 2 CPUs.  Therefore, to use a quad CPU setup would require a different OS (I don't know the limit in Vista).  The current price levels for either the Core 2 quad chips or the AMD 4x4 chips/motherboards seems insane for performance gain at this time. IMHO the best purchase at this time is a e6600 (though I like the e6400 too).  I use both a dual core AMD and one of the Core 2 Duos and it is crazy the performance boost I have seen.

Some articles

http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/07/14/core2_duo_knocks_out_athlon_64/
an article about the AMD 4x4 platfrom
http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/11/30/brute_force_quad_cores/

Quote - Also, is there an AMD quad?

The only quad-core system you would be able to get from AMD in any near future is the Quad-FX, although I would strongly advice against it.
It needs to have two processors installed, which means you have to double up on CPU-cooling and which also means that it can draw about 400 watts in idle-mode. It's quite the radiator.

Another thing, if you want to buy a QX6700, don't do it at Newegg, they overcharge.

^^ can you point out a cheaper vendor then?  I've been looking around a lot and their price is pretty competitive.

pjz try tigerdirect.com

yep that's a good price :)  Newegg must have some jacked up stuff going on with their pricing, two days ago Newegg had it at 1199.  Thanks for sending me that way, I expected the price to drop but not quite so soon!!

okay in attempting to get educated, I now see that you can get four threads on one CPU with Intel, namely the QX6700 pjz and others are mentioning.

Whereas with AMD you have to install two CPUs (until their true 4-on-one-cpu products develop).

Well, that would SEEM to put INTEL in the lead for Poser, but the heat issue and the power supply issue can be addressed. It would be worth doing so if 1) the overall cost to build a 4-thread system were less expensive with AMD; and 2) Poser renders would execute faster on a two-cpu AMD system. The issues of the FSB and Cache for these two prospective paths cannot be overlooked.

We will be fortunate indeed if we get some Poser benchmark testers with these high-end rigs. We'll have to drop the green flag and get out of the way.

I'll continue reading, including the tomshardware links above.

::::: Opera :::::

shouldn't worry too much about heat and CPU, people make huge deals out of them but basically get a 700+ watt CPU and put a big fat Zalman cooler on the CPU and you'll be okay.  Be sure to get good thermal grease when you install the cooler, often the freebie grease is garbage.  Shouldn't even try to use the Intel cooling fan that comes with the boxed version of the CPU, they are almost always junk.

Poser renders will come in at different speeds depending heavily on render settings.  I would bet a hundred bucks that it's not that simple, because rendering with raytracing on works profoundly differently mathematically than with raytracing off, and I'd expect things like Ambient Occlusion will also affect render time on one processor or another.  I'm not saying this one or that one is faster or better, but just be prepared for unexpected variation between the two brands, that's all.  Intel might whup AMD's butt in low quality renders while AMD might win in max quality renders  (MIGHT, I haven't actually looked at it that hard myself).

Hmm..... the  
INTEL QX6700 has a 1066MHz FSB.

 AMD Athlon 64 FX-62 2.80GHz / 2MB Cache / 2000MHz FSB / Socket AM2 / Dual-Core (Windsor)  

But what does this mean? On the Intel chip is it 1066 per each or for the entire CPU? Likewise on the AMD.

I want to again raise the issue that in our Poser benchmarks, FSB counted for A LOT. 

I see no way, however, to get the price down with AMD. 2x$720 plus extra cooling, extra power supply and perhaps the dual socket motherboard is more expensive. Compare that to the QX6700, INTEL path has to be less expensive.

per the thought of rcr62 above, just a single Dual core might be speed enough to get going.

Perhaps you could build two complete AMD computers, each with two threads, for a better price than any 4-thread solution at this time, and get the highest render speeds for Poser. That gives you better flexibility, too.

::::: Opera :::::

I am running Poser 7 on various machines right now. Oh well, multithreading implementation in Poser 7 is disappointing, very primitive. I'll post everything in a few hours.

(Operaguy, FSB has virtually NO influence on rendering times, in every 3D software that I know.)

I would be greatly surprised if high FSB vs. low FSB made no difference, as far as I understand it rendering is all about moving non-cached data in and out of the CPU and main memory.

Um - Operaguy, this is really all a bit silly.  Poser 7's render is still crap next to Vue's, just spend the money you might have dumped on 6 CPUs and whatnot and look into rendering your work in Vue.  Free demo of Vue 5i convinced me to buy version 6 just on render speed, not that I know how to use it too well yet.  Even the new version of the Firefly renderer is just plain junk next to Vue's renderer, and to top it off lighting is much, much easier to work with imo.

Rendering is all about CPU speed. Extremely small influence of memory speed, and no FSB influence (or should I say, negligible). But feel free to try for yourself. High bandwidth has almost no influence on 3D rendering, it's one of those hardware myths, thanks to all benchmark fanatics running Sandra & Co... :)

Really, what really counts is CPU speed, number of cores if the software supports them, and quantity of ram.

Well, you may be correct about the FSB louguet, but that is NOT what DaleB, svdl, other hardware people, and myself concluded last time we chewed this point.

Operaguy, Ok, then I am alone, no problem :)

I don't get how you can conclude that amount of RAM matters, but the speed at which data is transferred in and out of RAM will not. 

pjz99 regarding rendering in Vue. Yes, I am considering that. 

I highly prize the simplicity of staying in one app, however. Also, the Vue renderfarm system has severe problems, last time I looked at it.

Regardless of renderfarm issues, I still want one mighty Poser rig for development.

I'd welcome your feedback; have you run any intense production-level poser-based animations through Vue?

::::: Opera :::::

pjz99, because 

1. you need enough ram (quantity) to run your scene without swapping. If your scene fits in ram, then adding more ram is not useful anymore (for that particular scene).

2. The ram speed has a very limited influence because of the extremely high efficiency of modern CPU caches (on chip, + L2, etc.). Real memory access does not occur often when rendering because of this. Extremely repetitive computations fitting in the caches.

operaguy,

I have done some animation work with Poser 6 and Vue 6 (see the anim here http://renderfred.free.fr/animations.html, top of the page). Renderfarming in Vue with animated Poser characters is tricky, but it works.

Quote - I'd welcome your feedback; have you run any intense production-level poser-based animations through Vue?

Me?  Naw, I'm a nooby to Poser, I know hardware and OS and general application programming pretty well though.  I have stuck with single frame imports in Vue because that's all I have use for, but in that category when I benchmarked the Poser 6 vs. Vue 5i renderers, the Vue renders were literally a couple of hundred times faster.  I've only owned P7 and Vue 6 for a couple of days now and I've not had time to properly compare them, nor do I have the know how just yet to properly light a scene in Vue, although I'm not seeing a big enough improvement in Poser to really make me think it will make me regret buying Vue 6i.   I'll get back to you on that though.

Uh-oh. RETRACTION.
It is 6:44 AM here in California and I have been up all night.
I have to retract some of my content above.

In our prior studies, svdl, DaleB, stewer and others did come to a conclusion. But it was about the L2 Cache, not the FSB. I got my terms tangled. So, my appologies to  louguet and I am correcting this because the last thing I want to do is influence someone wrongly about such an expensive and critical purchase.

L2 Cache, not FSB, makes a big difference in Poser render speed.

Now I am headed to Starbucks for a Vente Mocha with a third shot.

::::: Opera :::::

May I make a suggestion? Before you go dealing with PC parts warehouses such as Tigerdirect and Newegg etc, check out this place and read all the compiled customer ratings about such companies. Resellersratings is the best to find out the rep of a company before you lay out your cash. All the ratings there are left by REAL customers (both pro IT people and everyday folks)  who have dealt with all types of companies from all over the US and some places in the UK. Resellersratings helped me stay away from companies with very, very bad ratings.

Please give them a look it can't hurt.

ok thanks pjz (does that stand for 'pajamas"?)

"Pendulous Jujubee Zorostrianism" actually.  Sealtm2 thanks for the reviewer page; it's a little annoying, I've dealt with Newegg many times and usually they are very competitive on pricing.  I suspect that there is just a price war going on for those processors.

Quote - "Pendulous Jujubee Zorostrianism" actually.  Sealtm2 thanks for the reviewer page; it's a little annoying, I've dealt with Newegg many times and usually they are very competitive on pricing.  I suspect that there is just a price war going on for those processors.

Well, you're talking to a true newegg freak! LOL. I've had many, many transactions with newegg and never had a problem with them and have found their prices the best. As a matter of fact my new dual core machine I just built had all it's parts come from Newegg. I've had dealings with other vendors only to have them turn out into nightmares!

Cheers,
Micheál

Yeah same here, my last two whole PCs were bought piecemeal from Newegg along with a lot of little odds and ends, that pricing discrepancy is really out of character for them in my experience.

Opera; Here's a condensation of what I've found over the years to date: 1)As of P6, the L2 cache performance mattered with Poser because it was a single threaded app. With the multithreading of at least some of Poser 7, (and AMD's hypertransport bus system (which intel is apparently in the process of copying)) easing the speed issues, it -may- not have as much relevance. 2)A lot of memory is only useful if the OS, and through it the app, can access it. A 32 bit program can still only address 2 gigs of physical ram per operation. They can do things like page flipping to sorta kinda trick things into using more physical ram, but you still have that 2 gig limit at any one time. 3) The current bottleneck in the rendering pipeline is not CPU or RAM; its HDD. Even if its just calls to the OS, hard drive access times are the new hurdle. In the rendergarden I have, I ran a test and found that the socket 754 Athlon 64-3000 with a gig of DDR-266 performs within a second/frame render time of the socket 939 Athlon 64 3000+ with a gig of DDR-400. If it were CPU makes all, the s939 would have been kicking the snot out of the s754, since the older chip only has the one memory controller, as opposed to the dual controller of the newer chip. If the memory bandwidth was the issue, then the DDR-400 should have been turning out over 40% faster times. Of the renderboxes, the one that is fastest is an Athlon 64 3200+; and that one is the closest to the X2 main system, and the only technical difference is that I put 2 SATA 3.0 drives on the 3200+ in a RAID 0 array. (I also currently have the parts on order to place a similar RAID array on one of the s939 systems, which should enable that testbed to exceed the s754's performance). ** The test scene was a 900 frame Poser anim with dynamic hair, so their were a lot of floating point calcs going on** -IF- you can fit all your scene and shadowmaps and resources and whatnot into ram, then the HDD issues become a lot less critical once things are loaded. But any access of the swapfile or temp files really slows the process down. If you want to use the quad core Athlon 64 in the future, then either get the AM2 socket (according the AMD the quads will slip right in there), or wait until the AM3 comes out, which will use DDR-3 memory.

As far as I know the Athlon 64 3000+ in socket 754 is a 2.0 GHz CPU, and the Athlon 64 3000 + in socket 939 is a 1.8 GHz CPU, so it seems logical that the older box compensates other deficiencies by a 10% slightly faster clock.

Personally I have never found that the hard disk speed was a bottleneck, unless of course there is not enough ram and swapping occurs, or the hard disks are incredibly slow. But on a renderfarm anything can happen :)

Just curious, but how does the OS see the Dual and Quad processors? I am assuming that XP sees the dual core as a single processor. If it doesn't then what are you going to run as an OS on a quad core system? XP only supports 2 processors, which I assume means it will run 2 x dual cores. If it's really 4 seperate cores then you will have to run a server OS to fully support them.

You need a server OS to run more than 2 physical CPUs (so 4, 8 etc.). XP Pro sees  2 CPUs max, but each CPU can have many cores. So a Clovertown system (2 cpus x 4 cores) runs well on XP 64, with 8 "cpus" displayed in the task manager. XP Pro 32 bit and XP 64 have the same limitations.