I've run into that exact problem as well (gray blocks appearing in the render with multiple threads)...it seems to be a bug with P7's render engine as it has done it to me on multiple configurations. The only correlation I can find is it does seem to be a problem with the geometry of some scene objects and light combinations. I would like to know what's up with that as well if anyone finds out anything.

I've been running XP-64 since it came out; I just upgraded my rig to a Opteron 185 (dual core); I've found it's very stable, much more so then with XP Pro.

That worked! Thanks TrekkieGrrl! I was about to lose my remaining sanity over this (not that there was much left anyway...)

I've been having problems when Poser 7 is first started, clicking anywhere on the menu gives me the "Build Folder Menu" prompt first, but when you select it, nothing happens......Poser 6 did this to - I guess because my main Runtime is a bloated mess of 20 GB, but it would ask for a confirmation then do it. In P7 it does nothing and is essentially unusable. I've found that if I exit the program, then restart it, it's fine, but it's pretty annoying to have to run the program twice. Has anyone else had this problem?

I've kept both installed, but so far, but I haven't run into any major problems with P7; the more I use P7, the more I appreciate  the improvements like the REAL undo (can even restore an deleted figure, yeaaaa!!), the improvements in the render engine, and the being able to handle multiple Runtimes without exiting on. So far, so good.

I've been playing around with P7 on my dual-core Athlon 64 running Windows x64, versus me Turion MT-40 laptop (single core), and while you see a little bit of a speed boost, it's not that dramatic running multiple threads. From what I can tell, the multiple threaded helps more with getting around the memory limit in a single thread (and thus, more complex scenes are able to render) and the render calculations rather then the rendering itself. Honestly, if you are thinking of getting a "Quad-Core" computer just for Poser, I think you're going to be wasting a lot of money for the expected return. You are much better off getting a mainstream Athlon X2 or Core 2 Duo system and saving the money.

 As far as CPUs go for a new system, in general, Core2 Duos are the better performers right now from the benchmarks I've seen on the high end (which is mostly games, which tend to be single threaded); Athlon X2 tend to be much easier to get and are better value (they've been out far longer), and holds it's own against the mid level C2D.  Either one is going to be a MUCH better performer then Pentium 4's no matter the P4's clockspeed or hyperthreading (P4 was a complete joke of a processor IMHO). I would doubt that the newest quad-core system is really going to be that much faster then a lot of the mainstream systems in Poser. Poser, being a weird animal composed of some very old and very new software technology,  always seems to hit a wall with scene complexity  that is the real limiting factor, (haven't seen this yet in P7, but I'm sure it's there) and not the hardware it's running on. It should tell you something that Vue, Bryce, Carrara, et all, can render faster, more complex scenes with their engines then Poser can on the same hardware.

While on the topic of CPUs, it should be noted, that the FSB buses (and speed) on the Athlons and Core2s are not really "apples to apples". Athlons have an integrated memory controller and thus it does not communicate with the main memory over the FSB as Intel chips do. Core2 makes up for this by having very large L2 (and even L3) caches to diminish the performance impact when it has to do memory calls through the FSB. Either way, the FSB speed is less important than it used to be.

At this time, I think both the Intel and AMD "Quad Core" designs are not worth it; I would wait until next year and see what products develop in that segment. Both companies are involved in a marketing driven technology race at this point. Intel's "Quad Core" chip is actually just  two dual core chips on the same piece of silicon, but all four cores must share the FSB bus for access to the memory; the could be a major problem for anything that is extremely memory intensive as it could cause the cores to stall out if they have to wait in line for access to the memory (something I can see a program like Poser doing). AMD's "Quad-FX" is basically  the same thing, as it is just two physical duo-core chips on a motherboard; the integrated memory controller and Hypertransport Bus helps mitigate some of the bottleneck issues with this approach but it's still hardly what I would call a true "Quad-Core" design.

"I am talking about loading a single figure, no props, posing and rendering from scratch."

I'm thinking there is something wrong with your P7 copy; I've been doing some testing between P6 and P7 on both my desktop (Athlon 64 x2 4600) and laptop (Turion MT-40) and I've been finding P7 is always faster. Just to rule out the obvious, are you sure it's not stopped because there is a missing path or geometry file? Sometimes the prompt is hidden, but it seems to freeze up the whole program. Also, what kind of video card is it (what Geforce series?) Do you have all updated drivers?

Do you mean the JPG files it creates, or the output of the render window?

I'm of the opinion that her head is too large be default...by that's a different anthill to kick over. ;-)

Actually, it is kind of funny that we all get into these discussions/arguments about body form; with every figure, it seems, for every person who think the body form is perfect, there are plenty of others who think it doesn't look like a "real" person. With 6 billion people on this planet, I'm sure there is plenty of room for variation.

I'm a little put off by V4's default eyes as well; they are a little to large, but I think it's more that they look too bright and untextured; putting a decent eye texture on them seems to solve the "1000 yard stare" she has.

"Just a quick test render at default firefly that would be done in about 30 seconds in P6 chokes and freezes. Reduce it to draft quality....It does it but it chugs..."

Klutz: you might want to try to build the test scene in P7 instead of opening an old P6 scene. I recall having some problems like that when I upgraded to P6 from P4; the errors were actually in some of the figure Cr2s (there was some extra garbage in them that P6 didn't like) and not in the render engine; you might be running into something like that.

I've tried it on both my Athlon 64 X2 4600 (2GB RAM, GeForce 6800 256 MB) desktop (running Windows X64) and my Turion MT-40 laptop (2GB RAM, WinXP Pro, Radeon X1600 256 MB) ...so far, I've been pleased with P7 - I haven't noticed a huge speed boost, but it has been able to render some scenes P6 would choke on without a problem and  without needing to decrease the bucket size or lower the quality.

From what I can tell, the multi thread feature is a real mixed blessing...this is not a true multiprocessor renderer (like Carrara), it seems more designed to help with the setup and memory workload rather then the actual rendering...in simple scenes, in fact, having it multithreaded actually seems to slow things down. I'm no expert at this stuff, but I would image the real advantage to enabling multiple threads would be to get around the memory limitation to a single thread in Windows for very complex scenes.

Got P7 last night and have been playing around a bit with it. The most jarring thing is that the interface has not changed AT ALL. I don't mind, as I'm very used to this, but I actually shut it down the first time it loaded because I thought I loaded P6 by mistake, LOL.

The good  news is, the rendering engine does indeed seemed to be much improved. The quality of a FireFly render is a bit better in the fine details from what I can can tell, but the big thing is that is doesn't die on large render scene...P6 would choke up and die like clockwork with anything more than 3 figures in a scene at once (out of memory errors, and my machine has 2GB of memory!); I've been pushing P7 to try to find it's limits and so far haven't found it! This is a very good thing, and that alone makes it worth the purchase.

I haven't messed around much with the new content, but is it just me, or is Sydney even weirder looking than Jessie? When I saw the thumbnail, I thought she was an Asian male figure!

I got it! Installing now! Woohooo!

I tried it couple of times with just  IE and Firefox, but it faulted out going no more than 50 MB into it and doing a top speed of 25KB; tried one of those download managers, and it's been flying along  (over 1GB now) at  290KB without a problem.