I know that this is might have been asked already but does Poser 5 support dual processors? I'm on a G4 533 and was thinking of upgrading to a Dual processor G5. Any thoughts? Pedrith :)

No. This "cutting-edge," "brand new" program doesn't support dual processors. ...Or vid cards, or hyperthreading... or....

Definitely not. Curious labs told me it only sees one of my two processors. I asked them. Love esther

This is not necessarily a bad thing people.

First off, code that can support dual/hyperthreaded procs (called multi-threaded code) is fundamentally more error prone and complex to write. You would expect more crashes and hangs in such code than in normal single-threaded code (even assuming the programmers are being careful)
Second, the rendering process isn't necessarily something that lends itself to a multi-threaded app. To take advantage of this, you need something where you can take advantage of doing two unrelated things at the same time. Rendering shadow maps might gain a benefit here (and you could render multiple frames of an animation, since they don't depend on each other), but at the cost of essentially running two copies of Poser at the same time. The really bad part is that you'd double your RAM consumption (in the worst case). If you have tons of RAM, you might net a speed increase, but if not, then you'll just get slowed down on greater disk access.
Third and finally, If you have a dual proc/multithreaded system and Poser only uses one of the procs (or virtual procs on a MT system), then the other proc is available to run your web browser, virus checker, e-mail, etc. without an impact to your render times!. That was the major reason I just upgraded to an MT processor, was so I could keep using my machine while I was rendering (before, the machine would get so bogged down on a render I'd have to go do something else in the meantime).

Dual Procs are not strictly for speeding up single apps. They are much better at guaranteeing that your machine stays responsive and usable while you're doing something complex.

Hi, agree it's nice to do other things at once. Vue though seems to see both my processors and seems to be able to load very large files 250 mb before it crashes whereas people with single processors tell me they have a 50mb limit so that's good. But as you say vue does seem buggy for me with quite a few crashes at times. And poser which only sees one of my two processors goes very very slowly to the point of almost being unuseable. So i need to get a bigger processor I think to use poser properly. On the other hand, photoshop also sees both my processors and never crashes. Oh well. just my experience. But I would like it if poser could see both processors as then i'm sure it would speed up. (my processors are only 500mhz each) Love esther

Again, not all types of work can take advantage of dual procs, and even those that can may not be faster as a result. In the real world, there are some jobs that aren't faster if you have two people do them. An example of this might be boiling a single egg. It doesn't matter how many people are in the kitchen, the egg still cooks at the same rate. There are some jobs that can be faster if there are more people, but only if conditions are right. An example is washing dishes by hand. Two people at a sufficiently large sink can get the job done roughly twice as fast. If, however, the sink is small, it won't get done twice as fast because they'll constantly have to be getting out of the way. Finally, there are some jobs that don't make sense to get done "faster". For example, it wouldn't be better to divide up a single piece of music between two musicians just so you could finish playing it faster. In the computer, things are very similar. There are some jobs that don't go faster no matter how many processors you have, like copying a file. There are some jobs that might be faster if you have enough resources, like rendering from a raytracer (where memory is the "sink" in the above example...if you have enough RAM, you could get better speed, but if not then the two processors just get in each other's way). Finally, there are jobs that don't make sense to speed up with a second proc (like playing back an animation). Poser doesn't take advantage of a second proc, but even if it did, I'd be surprised if it made a practical difference in any but the most powerful boxes. If you want to speed up Poser with hardware, you'd be much better served with by a faster processor, faster and larger supply of RAM, and a very fast set of disks (three is ideal...one for your OS, one for your swap file, and one for your applications and data). These things can shave minutes off your render times, but dual proc support probably cannot. (Disclaimer: I don't know the internals of Poser, so there may be more opportunities for multi-proc support than I can see. I base the above comments on a general Computer Science background and some basic understanding of graphics problems and ray tracing.)

Interesting. thanks. Love esther