mask2 opened this issue on Jun 23, 2008 · 12 posts
bagginsbill posted Tue, 24 June 2008 at 1:46 PM
"If you want to do anything else on your computer you should set the number of threads to the number of actual cores (this will leave one core available for other tasks). It also means that running as a separate process on a 4 core machine can never use all 4 cores for rendering."
Well that's one approach, but not ideal in my opinion.
First of all, if you want to have other programs remain more responsive during flat-out rendering, all you have to do is decrease Poser's priority. Go into Task Manager and right-click the poser renderer process (whichever you're using). Then select "Set Priority" and "BelowNormal". Once you do this, Poser will immediately give up control of the CPU if any other process (such as your browser) needs it, because all your other programs will have "Normal" priority by default. But if your system would otherwise be idle, then Poser will get 100% of the CPU cores that are available. This is much better than trying to give equal priority to all processes.
Second, even if you have only two cores, you should set Poser to use 4 threads. The reason is that Poser is a little bit stupid. Suppose you launch a render that has very easy stuff in the upper half, but very difficult reflection+refraction+AO in the lower half (like where your shiny floor is, or a lake or whatever - it is very common to have a harder time with the bottom half.) If you use only two threads, one will work on the upper half and finish very quickly, then stupidly go to sleep. The second thread, working on the bottom half, will continue for hours without any help from the first thread.
But if you use 4 threads, the top gets 2 and the bottom gets 2. The top 2 will finish early and go to sleep. But the bottom 2 will keep cranking away, using your 2 cores nearly 100%, and finish the bottom half of the image in half the time.
I always render with 4 threads on my dual-core machines.
Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)