Quote - kawecki: absolutely not true that all new computers are at least quad core. In fact, both Intel and AMD still manufacture and market older generation tech - you can still buy e.g. Pentium CPUs on brand new machines. (Why anyone would, given how better stuff has come down in price, is another question.)

I am still doing software for the Intel's 8085 and the 8085 (8 bit 1985's microprocessor) is still being manufactored by a lot of frabricants and used in a great number of products. And in other application where is required more processing power I am using the Intel's 8088, a 16 bit processor with 8 bit bus.

I am disappointed with the new processors, for me the best processor design was Pentium I MMX, but it doesn't mean that I shall return to use it just because my Athlon II X2 3GHz runs 15 times faster than my old Pentium I MMX 200 MHz.

I make software, I optimize the software in speed. The problem is how to compare the speed of software if everytime you are using a different processor ?

The only way to compare is to have some measurement unit that is independent of the processor you are using. You cannot measure the time because a 3.3 GHz processor always will give less time than a 2.4 GHz processor.

The unit that is independent of the processor you are using and its speed is the processor clock. I measure the speed of a piece of code in number of CPU clocks that takes to execute this piece of code and the result that I get it will not matter if I running Windows 7, XP or Linux.

More than ten years ago I did some software and optimized it to make the critical parts run as faster as I could. I used that time my old Pentium I MMX-200 MHZ. Time has passed, had new computers and the processors improved with new features, 3dNow, SSE, SSE2 and so on.

Two years ago I decided to re-write my old code using new resources of the new processors. SSE/SSE2 are very useful for 3d applications, in this way I could have a piece of code that will be able to run (in clock units) even much more faster than my old code.

My first big surprise was when I measured the speed of my old code running a modern computer. The result should have been less clocks to execute the piece of code, because modern CPU have more execution units, or at least to have the same speed. But it was not, the speed of the modern CPU was much slower executing the same piece of code.

I re-wrote the code using all the power of the new features of modern CPUs, optimised, but I was only able to achieve the same speed (in clock units), but not faster.

In resume, the 2010 piece of code running a 2010 CPU has the same speed as the 2000 code running a 2000 CPU. And I am using now powerful resources that were not available in 2000.

The reason of all this I can explain, but it would be a long technical discussion.

Quote - I saw a massive difference when I moved from dual to Quad core with H/T,  both in rendering times and the size of scenes I could build without any problems.

The problem is how you do the comparison, you are not comparing two with four cores. When you moved to quad cores, you had a new processor with a new processor design, a new motherboard with a new chip set, faster memory with greater memeory bus speed and more memory and moving from 32 to 64 bit software also can be significative.

Every time you buy a new computer or processor + motherboard it will run faster than the previous older one. If you buy today a new computer you will not be able to find a single one that has less than four cores, all are multicore today.

If in 2013 fabricants decide to redesign the processor and return to only one core, it also will run faster. This will not mean that a single core run faster that eight cores, it only will mean that a 2013 processor runs faster than a 2011 processor

Modern processors are designed and optimised for the average user runing an average application. To keep the average user happy, efficiency and performance was sacrificed. Depending on how you see, it are cheating you.

The result that you have will depend on what you are doing and the software you are using, you can be very happy with the results or very pissed of.

HyperThreading is creating a fake core, they are cheating making you believe that you have more cores. Hyperthreading use a part of the CPU that you are not using to run other thread that, of course, doesn't need the part you are using. If this is the case you will have with a lower cost the benefit of a processor with more cores. If is not the case and you are using all the CPU, hyperthreading is useless.

In the rendering example where you assigned a core for a rendering bucket, in theory for a well designed rendering engine with the right schedulling and pipelines there will be nothing left without use in the core. While one part is accessing memory all the arithmetic units are executing data in the pipelines. The core will be runing at full steam and hot temperature and hyperthreading will not work because there is nothing left iddle in the CPU.

On the other hand, if the rendering engine has not an efficient design, most of the time of rendering the bucket is spend calling subroutines and passing parameters and calling again another subroutine and so on, the CPU will have little use with a lot of iddle parts that can be used by hypethreading for doing other things. In this case hyperthreading can be useful.

In theory it would be great if you were able to put Windows and its all services in one core and leave the other cores free for your exclusive use, but you have no control on what and how Windows is doing and managing the cores.

The other big problem is even you have many cores available not everithing is a ble to be done in pararell. Some steps to be able to execute requires a result from a previous step and 100 cores will have the same result of one core.

For example, if you want to render Vicky you must first load her. You can assign a core for the rendering and another for the loading process, but the rendering core will do nothing until the loading core finsihed the Vicky loading process, then and only then can start the rendering process and and this time the loading core will do nothing because has nothing to do.

Some processes such as unbiased rendering are very suitable to be run in paralell and so more cores or computer clouds will produce a great result in rendering speed.

With unbiased renderers the rendered image is formed by the sum of randomly taken samples of the scene. One core can be taking one sample at some point and the other cores other samples at other points and all is summed over the time in a common memeory. More cores or computers you have, more samples are taken per second. The process goes forever until you stop when achieves the desired quality you wanted.

With other class of rendering, for example if you use shadow maps, you cannot start the rendering process before all the shadow maps were rendered. You can render all the shadow maps in paralell, but the rendering itself will have to wait until all shadow mpas are done.

Quote - reduces my render time even with little else running. Maybe that's an illusion.

But your Windows is running with a lot of services eating your CPU and memory

Memory is common and shared by all cores, if your software has an intensive usage of memory, the memory itself becomes the bottleneck of the process and so, no matter how many cores or threads you use, one thread or core when wants to access memeory will have to wait doing nothing for the other cores release the memory

More simple is a figure more figures you can put easily in a scene. I did some thing to make a figure simple and still posable.

Some directives

1- No morphs. The geometry itself is a morphed version of the original figure.

2- No tongue, teeth and internal mouth. You don't see this unless you want the figure to open its mouth and the mouth will not because you don't have mouth morphs.

3- No toe bone.

4- No fingers bones, only hand. You eliminate a lot of bones.

5- Of course, no upper neck and buttocks bones

6- Reduce the number of materials, it makes more easier to handle the figure.

7- Try to create a figure with only one texture map and only one material.

8- Avoid using transparencies. A transparency consumes a lot of CPU processing. Eliminate lashes and other transparencies.

9- Simple eye, only a sphere or half-sphere with only one material and no transparencies.

10- Try to use hair that is painted in the texture map or some geometry that still looks good without the need of transparencies.

11- As the figure lacks of morphs and have no expressions, a jaw bone can help to solve this problem.

12- If is a dressed figure, include the cloth in the geometry and eliminate all the polygons of the figure that are behind the cloth.

Quote - > Quote - > Quote - We don't have hurricanes or earthquakes down here in Brazil.

But we have global warming in winter and global freezing in summer or summer and winter in the same day, and I hate rain !

You're lucky. In my city, we have four seasons: summer, high-summer, hell on earth and "we can breathe again" (which is what people call winter)... LOL

I am not lucky, Tuesday I had 37 degree Celsius (100 F) and is still winter, this was good, but yesterday returned winter and I am freezing now. Sao Paulo da maldita garroa !!!

Quote - We don't have hurricanes or earthquakes down here in Brazil.

But we have global warming in winter and global freezing in summer or summer and winter in the same day, and I hate rain !

Don't forget to find some barrels with salt

I don't know how much incompatible V5 will be with Poser, but if I like her I shall rework her to be able to work with Poser. If I don't like her I shall ignore her as I did with V2/V1

Quote - Top left of the yahoo mail, click your name, click Account Details,

I found it and all is OK.

Quote - I found a yahoo page that lists my "Recent Login Activity"

Where can I find this page ?