My P7 and PP(base) on Vista Ultimate 64bit started this week dropping rendering threads.

Usually they start normally processing lights with single thread.
Then starts utilizing all 4 cores as it start rendering, but in middle of render it drops the load to 75% then to 50% and finally to 25% or near 0%.

This happens both with and without external render process.
And Pro is using 64bit FFrenderer.

I have to recheck when I get home if my Vue does the same, so it could indicate temperature problem under heavy load. But if I remember correctly when poser started doing this Vue has still rendered with all cores thru the whole render.

Really annoying as it take quite a while longer to render with singe core :(
No changes in system (except there might be some MS patches earlier this week that I have to check). Couple addtions to runtime, but this happens even I'm not using those or if I just load some old scene which rendered ok previously.

Any other ideas why this is happening?

It's probably just that the cores have finished rendering their respective section of the Poser scene. Once a core finishes, it doesn't get re-used by the rest of the render, it just sits waiting for the other cores to finish.

Thanks

I've been wondering every now and then why the render bar progress is almost finished but rendered image on screen is far away being finished. Then the rest of it just pops out in an instant.

I have to run tests to verify if that is the case.

Though atleast P7 did that this too: load dropped to 0% and it did something (~20%) only once a while for a short period of time. which it never did before.
It did that even during before actual render while doing lights..

I'll run some VUE scene render later tonight to comletely rule out temperature issue..

Once a core is finished, it just sits there. Lots of people are hoping for this to be fixed (including me) in the next Poser :-)

-Sarah

If you render in the scene window with Seperate Process switched off.... you can see/watch as Poser renders the 4 quarters of the image... depending on how the contents of the scene are placed you can see thte quarters rendering/finishing at different times depending upon what is in them.

The cores of your pooter operate accordingly... some will slow down and/or stop before the others.

Quote -
I've been wondering every now and then why the render bar progress is almost finished but rendered image on screen is far away being finished. Then the rest of it just pops out in an instant.

When rendering in Seperate Process mode (fastest) I find that the top half of the render completes and as you say the render progress bar almost completes and then the whole of the bottom half of the render pops up finished.

Yep, this is the unbelievably primitive way that FireFly splits up a scene for rendering. If all the processor-heavy bits (transmapped hair, transparency maps etc.) fall in one chunk, it can take forever.

They really need to address this for version 8.

thanks for all the explanation.

I really thought it would divide it to smaller chunks and as a core finishes one it would take next free one..

In ssome applicationss you can set the number of threads higher than available processors and get a small inprovement while one thread waits on disk i/o.   It could be worth trying if poser lets you set number of threads. 

would be worth a shot but poser only offers up to number of your cores.

Any ideas how to get that slider beyond the max position? ;)

Oh by the way rule out the temp issue...CPU running at 32C idle and 41C under 100% load..

Quote - would be worth a shot but poser only offers up to number of your cores.

Any ideas how to get that slider beyond the max position? ;)

To the best of my knowledge, you can set a maximum of 4 - I have tried editing the Poser.ini file to change the number of render threads to 8, but launching Poser then sets it back to 4. So that's what you're stuck with - unless anyone else has any ideas?

I ran two Poser 6 installations using two user accounts and fast user switching on the PC to take advantage of my dual core back in the days those were new. That should still work... Not sure about the licensing, I had enough of those licences ;-)

yeah well I could do that with PP and P7 I guess..
woudn't it work even without different users