Operaguy,

     Thank you very, very much for the script! :)

Here are some numbers I pulled from my AMD 64 4400+ X2 Dual Core Processor:

Simple Low Quality Render
Render time = 151.07 seconds. 1 Core/2 Threads
Render time = 104.29 seconds. 2 Cores/2 Threads

Moderate High Quality Render
Render time = 1546.12 seconds. 1 Core/2 Threads
Render time = 842.21 seconds. 2 Cores/2 Threads
Render time = 789.52 seconds. 2 Cores/4 Threads*

You'll notice that the benefits of the additional core are much greater the more complex or higher quality the render. This is because the pre-render portion of the process (loading textures and meshes, calculating shadow maps, etc...) only uses a single core. Once that is out of the way and the actual render starts, you get full advantage of the cores/threads.

The way Poser Firefly utilizes additional cores is very efficient, but the boost as a percent will vary from image to image. With two cores, one core renders the top half of the image and one core renders the bottom half. If there is more computationally intensive content in one half vs. the other (human characters have more to render in the top half and raytracing transmapped hair seems to be a big resource hog), one core can finish before the other, which leaves that core idle for the rest of the render.

With 4 threads, it splits the image into quarters.

If anyone is going to test this out on their system, make sure to quit Poser after each render and restart the application. Poser will reuse some pre-render information from the same session, to make sure that doesn't skew the results you need to quit and restart poser. :)

*note the third line of test two is only two cores, but with 4 threads. The added performance was likely due to the way the scene was quartered up between the threads. Even though two threads finished before the other two, both cores were active for the entire render.