I'm going to post this here, since there is no "Techie" forum that I can find.

My problem is not really Poser, as the same thing happens when I run Cinebench R10, still, Poser is the only app I run that triggers this.

I have an AM2 6400+ processor, NVidia GeForce 9800 GT card with updated drivers, 8 gigs of memory, and plenty of disk space. All is well when I render, as long as I only use one thread. If I try 2,3, or 4 threads, the renders get about 20% finished, then lock the machine tight requiring a reboot. Cont-Alt-Del will not bring up the task manager. The lock is tight, and the mouse arrow is frozen.

I reported this to Smith Micro, and they had me try Cinebench R10 benchmark program. Same results there. Renders finish using one core, but lock 20% in using two cores.

SM engineers suggest it is a power supply issue, however, I'm running a 700 watt power supply, and it tests good. It is not running hot.

Can any of the techies in the group suggest a way to trouble shoot this? I'm fairly literate in computer science (Electrical Engineer), but I'm stumped on this one. All help will be appreciated.

Doug
 

 Which OS? 

 Windows XP 64

You can try adjusting the driver setting "Threaded Optimisation", IIRC "Off" is the value that works best with Poser.

 Where is this located? I.E. how do I get to it?

Quote -  Where is this located? I.E. how do I get to it?

It should be somewhere in the Nvidia control panel.

I had this problem when rendering one image a couple of weeks ago. After browsing the pdf manual through Poser, it said that if I had a dual core system I could use four threads. I tried that. Rendered one image. Okay. Tried a second more complicated image and it froze and locked my machine near the end of the render. I have dropped it down to 2 threads and checked the box that says "Use Own Passes". I also discovered at this time that, at least on my machine, Poser 8 does not like a bucket size of 16. I now use with Poser 8, a bucket of 32. With Poser Pro, I was using a bucket of 64. In Poser 8, I can't really use a bucket size that large.

 OK, I set threaded Optimization "Off", set threads to 2 and bucket size to 16.

No difference at all.

I strongly suspect this is either a hardware issue, or something not right with my XP 64 setup. I'm afraid my next step is to reformat the drive and start over with nothing installed but Poser. Anyone got a better solution?

This is what worked for me.

1. For dual core system, set threads to 2
2. Check "Use own passes"
3. Bucket size of 20 to 32
4. Check in Documents and Settings folder, Local Settings, Temp folder and clean out Poser 8's Texture cache. If I do three images in a night, there can be over 3 gigs of files in the cache taking up valuable hard drive space.
5. Try conservative settings for IDL. I use only 1 or 2 bounces at the most and usually only 190 samples. My machine only has 512 megs of RAM and 30 gigs of free hard disk space. So I have to stay conservative.
6. No AO on lights. No ray traced shadows. Only 1 raytrace bounce unless there is glass, water, or true reflective metals in my image. Everything I'd learned to do with AO and IBL lighting in P7 and PoserPro I've had to throw out the window. So keep lights simple. Two or 3 lights strategically placed can do the trick. I also don't use shadow maps over 512.
7. In Windows System, checking the size of your paging file and increase it if you can.

Even with all of this, I still have a couple of saved pz3 files from Poser Pro that I cannot render using IDL.

 While I appreciate the Poser oriented advice, I don't believe this is going to solve the problem, as I have the problem with the Benchmark software as well... this points to something wrong in my machine.

Anyone have suggestions in that direction?

 I just received a new phenom 4 core processor. Solved all my problems. It was a cpu problem.

4 cores and seven years ago ...

Quote - 4 cores and seven years ago ...

Heh heh.^^

All of my 'pooters have threaded optimization set to "on" in the nVidia control panel.  I was under the impression that this is correct, but I don't know?
      I rendered a big (pixel dimension) and complex (high poly with intricate materials) wallpaper this morning running eight threads at high quality settings.  Took a while, but no problem.