Hi,

Im encountering a strange problem with poser 7 & poser pro, when i try to render it is not using anywhere near 100% of my CPU (in fact usually it sits around 10 - 15% usuage)

This is making even basic renders painfully slow :|

I have an intel i7 860 (all at stock settings), 4GB of ram, and am runing windows 7 64-bit.

I have both posers set to use 4 threads and running in a background process.

By all rights i should be able to render at a fair pace, but the way things are going my old core 2 duo can render quicker than this :(

Anyone got any ideas what could be wrong and possible fixes ?

Thanks ;)

You need P8 to max out an i7. P7 and PPro can't do it because of the retarded way they use multiple threads.

You really want it to use 100%???

Laurie

That will be yet another version of poser to sit on my hard drive along with 6, 7 & pro :mellow:

i was doing some testing and i loaded up a scene i had created a while back and it seemed to render perfectly, i almost cryed when i seen all 4 cores working at 100% :crying:

So i tried another scene which i had been messing around with and for the most part it was rendering ok (until i got about halfway through rendering then it dropped to 50% CPU usuage then decided to spaz out going between 1% & 50%) :huh:  It seems rather strange that the main scene im working on at the moment is causing poser to spaz out and not want to use the CPU :huh:

Whats poser 8 like for rendering large scenes anyways ? i have a few ideas for large scenes in my head and the main reason i installed win 7 64-bit was so i could use the large memory and avoid out of memory errors :mellow:

Quote - You really want it to use 100%???

Laurie

Damn right i do..... i dont have any other programs which use all 4 cores to their max, i want to make my CPU work for its money :lol:

Quote - So i tried another scene which i had been messing around with and for the most part it was rendering ok (until i got about halfway through rendering then it dropped to 50% CPU usuage then decided to spaz out going between 1% & 50%)   It seems rather strange that the main scene im working on at the moment is causing poser to spaz out and not want to use the CPU

P7 and PPro work by dividing your scene into 4 quarters and then render each with it's own thread. This is fine if all 4 quarters of your scene are equally complex, but most scenes aren't like this, so what really happens is that 1-2 threads run through the easier quarters first and then sit around idle while the complex quarters chug on the remaining threads. In effect you get a quick 100% at the start and then end up with the performance of 1 or 2 cores and 25%-50% CPU load.

P8 though divides your scene per bucket so that all threads are always loaded to the max. AFAIK there is no way to do this on earlier versions.

P8 is rather finicky to say the least.  It may do well with large scenes if you carefully plan your material room and render settings.  But it does utilize your CPU better, the way Poser was intended to function.

Quote - You really want it to use 100%???

Yeah actually, you really do.  If a render takes 10 hours at 50% CPU usage, then it will take 5 hours at 100% CPU usage.  If you spend a lot of time waiting for renders to finish...

Yeah, you want 100% power. Slow cooking a render doesn't make it better. It just takes longer.

Leaving CPU cores idle does not represent any sort of improvement of resources. Using less than 100% of memory is good. Using less than 100% of CPU is not good. It's like boiling a pot of water with the stove set to low.

Anwyays, it is true that PPro can fail to use 100% because it only divides the render into 4 pieces, one piece per core, and once that core finishes, it  does not go to help on another piece.

However, what the OP describes is not that. You don't get 1 to 5% CPU use because of quadrant allocation. You get 25%, 50%, or 75%, not some fraction much less than 25%. There is a bug in PPro. I never put my finger on it, but I have scenes involving reflections and large texture maps that do this. They do not do this in P8 or PPro 2010. I suspect it is due to excessive disk thrashing, resulting in the CPU having nothing to do while waiting for texture data to be swapped back into memory. I think it was related to the optimization introduced in P7 to make sure that textures use a constant and limited amount of memory, no matter how big they actually are or how many there are.

I usually observed this when I loaded a 10K by 5K image on  my environment sphere. This does not happen with a significantly smaller image.

I don't know what to do about it, other than find some giant textures you don't really need to be giants, and use reduced versions.

I was just going to post the something along the lines as BB did, glad I did read all of the posts first. It's a known and even reported bug, but the poser team somehow was never able to fix it. I've had scenes where poser pro would just spent hours rendering with 5% cpu power assigned to the render.

The problem is gone with P8, but P8 amplifies another poser rendering bug...... transparencies. When using transparencies in P8 it will choke FireFly. That happens in previous versions as well, but has become worse in P8.

Seems like the poser team just isn't able to tackle some of these persistent bugs. Instead of focusing on new features, they should deal with killing all these carried over bugs in P8.

Quote - I was just going to post the something along the lines as BB did, glad I did read all of the posts first. It's a known and even reported bug, but the poser team somehow was never able to fix it. I've had scenes where poser pro would just spent hours rendering with 5% cpu power assigned to the render.

The problem is gone with P8, but P8 amplifies another poser rendering bug...... transparencies. When using transparencies in P8 it will choke FireFly. That happens in previous versions as well, but has become worse in P8.

Seems like the poser team just isn't able to tackle some of these persistent bugs. Instead of focusing on new features, they should deal with killing all these carried over bugs in P8.

And walk through the door into the 64-bit age and I don't mean just the render engine. :(

Quote - The problem is gone with P8, ...

Seems like the poser team just isn't able to tackle some of these persistent bugs.

Ummm. didn't you just say the problem is gone in P8? LOL. How could they apparently be unable to tackle this bug if it is gone?

Or do you mean that they should release another SR for P7?

I guess you missed a little bit when reading ;-)

I saw the middle about transparencies.

I was just teasing you, nitipicking because of the word "some" - "isn't able to tackle some of these". See what I mean? They did tackle some, just not all.

This is a quirk of our language I find amusing.

You obviously meant there are some bugs that they haven't fixed.

But another interpretation is that they are unable to fix some, as in unable to fix anything at all.

I see :-) I do hope they'll be able to fix the transparency render slowdown one of these days.

Stefan was telling me about the transparency problem. I don't fully understand the problem myself, as even after hearing about it, it still seems possible to me that it should not be that big a deal.

Firefly is actually two different renderer strategies combined - REYES and raytracing. In REYES, transparencies are not processed in and of themselves. Rather there is some sort of back-to-front rendering that doesn't involve a "global view" of the geometry. (Again, I don't fully get that.) But when processing a ray, hitting a transparent surfaces is like tripping while running. The renderer finds that surface but has to launch another ray which starts the whole "global view" things again. (I know I'm not being clear, but I'm not clear on this myself.)

If you pile up 6 layers like this as happens with some hair, you get a lot of tripping. You get a similar slowdown if you set up 6 layers of refraction and try to render through it. 

I think the case may be that to completely fix this would require that Firefly be discarded altogether.

So i got poser 8 and the problem still remains..... though the rendering speeds are slightly better...

So i spent most of this night experimenting, Loaded up a standard V4 with no morphs injected, and started applying the skin materials then rendering and seeing what happened... what i discovered was most were rendering fine, poser using pretty much all CPU usage... but some were not, the second the render hit the V4 the cpu useage dropped like a brick off the eiffle tower.

But the thing is the ones that are killing the cpu usage have worked perfectly in the past (though i was using winxp 32-bit then), i checked their texture resolutions and theres nothing out of the ordinary....

Also i have noticed another thing, in the scene im working on i have the figure "night world fallen" when i render it alone in a new scene, no problems whatsoever, but in my scene when the render hits him my cpu usage drops.... and even once or twice the problem V4 textures have rendered fine...

There is no common problem relating all this and its affecting all posers (7, pro & 8)

god my head hurts :(

again anyone got any ideas to what could be causing pretty much all modern versions of poser to mock me ? :(

Mystery!

You're rendering in a separate process, right. What if you render in-process?

Still the same, but i can see the black squares reveal in realtime now....  whenever the "being processed" bucket block is over a figure there is a delay as other buckets carry on to render the background, and while all thats happening all the cores are usually between 1 - 15%

When all the buckets are rendering background the cpu shoots right up, hits a figure and back down :|

Grrr. Perhaps contacting SM is in order. This doesn't sound right. Submit a bug report?

what else is in memory at the time?
do a ctrl/shift/esc and see what you have running. (same as crlt/alt/del but takes you to the processes directly rather than the menu screen)

Quote - Stefan was telling me about the transparency problem. I don't fully understand the problem myself, as even after hearing about it, it still seems possible to me that it should not be that big a deal.

Firefly is actually two different renderer strategies combined - REYES and raytracing. In REYES, transparencies are not processed in and of themselves. Rather there is some sort of back-to-front rendering that doesn't involve a "global view" of the geometry. (Again, I don't fully get that.) But when processing a ray, hitting a transparent surfaces is like tripping while running. The renderer finds that surface but has to launch another ray which starts the whole "global view" things again. (I know I'm not being clear, but I'm not clear on this myself.)

If you pile up 6 layers like this as happens with some hair, you get a lot of tripping. You get a similar slowdown if you set up 6 layers of refraction and try to render through it. 

I think the case may be that to completely fix this would require that Firefly be discarded altogether.

I get the general idea of this, hopefully they can find a way to at least bring some improvement. Totally discarding Firefly would be a shame, imo.

 I don't think they will do that. Firefly has improved SO much since P5, I'm pretty optimistic that Stefan will find solutions for the remaining problems. 

I doubt a bug report will help....

I installed windows XP 32-bit in a dual boot on my comp.... and the same problems are happening in it.....

So that rules out it being a windows 7 problem, & a poser install problem....

there's an update for the bios on my  motherboards site, cant hurt to try that... if that fails, then i guess i will try daz studio shudders for my rendering needs...

Quote - Still the same, but i can see the black squares reveal in realtime now....  whenever the "being processed" bucket block is over a figure there is a delay as other buckets carry on to render the background, and while all thats happening all the cores are usually between 1 - 15%

When all the buckets are rendering background the cpu shoots right up, hits a figure and back down :|

What are the shaders of the figure like? Large textures without filtering can be very demanding in file I/O, resulting in the CPU having to wait for the hard drive.

Am i allowed to show the shader settings of a store bought character ?

Just thought i'd ask since i dont want to post it then have someone saying "your revealing my secrets" ;)

I turned off texture filtering on everything in the scene, also theres not really much hard drive activity when the cpu droppage happens, when loading everything and rendering the light shadowmaps the drives are at over 100mb per second in transfer rates then when it comes to actuall rendering the drive I/O is sitting at under 10mbps :|

I installed the latest bios, and still no luck ! :|

Hell last night i even tried having my poser installs on one drive, the runtimes on another and the windows page file on another drive so there should be no bottleneck with data transfer on a single drive..... still no joy !!! :|

Have you tried leaving texture filtering turned on? 

yup,

still the same !!!! :|