Will Poser utilize a quad core processor? I know it does great with dual core but don't know about quad.

Yes.  There's info at the Smith-Micro site on this. Renders will complete in almost half the time as a duo-core system.

There is a setting in render options for how many threads a render can use. So quad core is fine , just set 4 or more threads .

markschum
When you set it at 4, do you have to make sure the (Separate Process) box is checked or no?  Thanks.

I have Poser 5 and it appears that it too uses all four cpu's.  I started the program and monitored the action on the performance screen of my task manager.  In fact everything on the computer uses all four.  Even when completed, all four has some activity.  Could be wrong-still learning my new computer.  Jan

You don't have to check the Separate Process box.

Separate Process is a little slower than in-process, since it requires process-to-process communication, with quite a lot of data to be transferred.
An advantage of rendering in a separate process is the fact that it can render more complex scenes than the Poser in-process renderer, due to the fact that this separate process does not have the overhead of a user interface - it's the render engine, a little bit of communication logic, and that's it.

With regard to setting the number of threads used I've found that 4 produces the fastest render on my dual core machine.

I was surprised that the manual said that a duo core processor will also realize gains by using four threads. It also recommends checking Separate Processes for complex scenes, but doesn't make much effort to define what a complex scene is.

Quote - I was surprised that the manual said that a duo core processor will also realize gains by using four threads. It also recommends checking Separate Processes for complex scenes, but doesn't make much effort to define what a complex scene is.

I think how complex the scene need to be varies with how much memory your machine has.

My older machine (2meg) used to crash fairly often without render as a seperate process but my 4 meg laptop works either way.

I'm so glad I asked about quad core. I had no idea you could set Poser for 4 threads on a dual-core machine. I'm changing it right now. That's fantastic.

Thanks everyone!

You do need to enable the Separate Process setting in order to fully utilize multiple cores. The main Poser executable is a single-threaded 32-bit application and though your operating system will spread the work across multiple cores, Poser will not be able to fully utilize the processing capacity of multiple cores because it only supports a single thread. FFRender.exe supports multi-threading and will fully utilize multiple cores.

Also, regarding setting the number of threads to 4 with a dual core processor: This only improves performance when the processor supports Hyper-Threading. Old Pentium 4 dual core processor and the new i7 processors from Intel support Hyper-Threading. Core 2 Duo processors do not.

setting more threads than you have processors may not give as much of a speed improvement, what it does is keeps the processor fed with tasks , while one is doing a disk access the other thread uses the processor.   even on a single processor you can get some benefit from running two threads.