Quote - Another performance thing I've discovered - but not nailed down. On my laptop, I run 4 threads. In certain situations, Poser stops using 100% of my CPU - it drops to 3 or 4 percent. This means a render takes hours.

I've found that dropping to a single thread will fix this. That means on my dual core I never use more than 50% CPU, but at least it stays at 50%, which is much better than 3%.

I have no idea why this happens. I suspect some mistake in Poser where the multiple threads are all curteously waiting for each other by mistake, and none of them do any work for long periods. By using only a single thread, any attempts at multi-thread coordination are skipped and it goes full speed (but uses only half my dual-core.)

Has anybody else seen this?

I have seen this, I have it on my main computer, an Athlon dualcore. Usually this happens, when I have ray traced shadows or AO with a low ray bias, but not all the time. It never happened with depth mapped shadows, and it usually don't happen with ray tracing either. Changing the rai bias made it go away in two cases, switching to depth mapped shadows worked for me all the time.

But I did  not encounter this problem very often. In fact I even posted a thread about this but did not get any usefull answers. 

A ship in port is safe; but that is not what ships are built for.
Sail out to sea and do new things.
-"Amazing Grace" Hopper

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