Right now I have a P4 2.6mghtz system with 1 gig of ram. I need a new machine and I'm wondering how different processors affect rendering in P6. Will a 3.2 HT be significantly faster or only marginally faster. Unless it's a 20-30% increase at the very minimum, I don't want to bother with it. What about a dual processor or an AMD 64? Do those speed up render times significantly? Thanks for the info...

IMO it will not significant speed up rendering times. You get bettereffects with additional RAM, you know, the only thing that is better then RAM is more RAM. Poser isn't coded to take advantage of dual processors so you may only feel the difference when using other applications parallel. One thing is for sure true. If you buy a new machine today, it's out of date when you leave the shop.

Haven't made the move myself, but my understanding is that dual core will help, as the rest of system, including the OS can run on 1 core while render is taking nearly 100% of the other. HT is becoming discredited with findings that almost all, not just many, applications run slower with HT on than off. That's not to say that at a given instance you can't get faster response, but if you had the wall clock time available doing each task one after the other would be more efficient in total CPU time, than using HT to do both in parallel. Poser will not be able to take advantage of HT or dual core internally - it's base code is just too old - by at least a decade! AMD 64 will give you more CPU bang for the buck than any current Intel product currently. So a dual core AMD 64 is the way to go IMHO, but I'm waiting for prices to drop out of the stratosphere - shouldn't be too much longer for the bigger cache models...

Unless you're using applications that are optimized for the long Pentium IV pipelines, AMD is the way to go. Dual-core and 64 bit is good, very good. Seems like the Athlon64x2 4400+ is the sweet spot - it's got 1 MB L2 cache instead of the 512K of the 4200, it's marginally more expensive than the 4200, and - very important - large caches are highly beneficial to Poser! The other option that's worth considering is a Pentium M machine. They have 2M cache, which is why a Pentium M at 1.8 GHz performs like a desktop Pentium at 3.0 Ghz. As far as I know, there are no 64 bit versions or dual core versions of the Pentium M yet. And they're friggin' expensive too. Agree with layingback about the HT. The trouble is that both "cores" access the same L1 data cache, which is only 8K in a Pentium IV. A real dual core machine has separate L1 caches for each core and a shared large L2 cache.

So either go AMD 64 or Dual Processor... gotcha... thanks for the tips...

It's not "either - or". The Athlon64x2 4400+ is a dual core CPU.

Oh... Okay... What about a dual P4 or do those even exist?

Hi onimusha,

Another thought worth considering, while you are waiting for Poser 7 (with built in multi-threaded and 64-bit memory support ---- I WISH!), is that Poser 6 can be used to pose a scene that you can then RENDER in something that is possibly faster on the new hardware - as long as you lay off the dynamics and the Poser 6 material shaders. I believe that some of the Vue line can support multiple CPUs (or multiple workstations) doing a render (I think they are called "Render cows"). Svdl would know much more about this as he is very skilled with Vue.

I tend to agree with the feeling that AMD X2s are probably the best performing processors at a reasonably affordable price point. You might want to check out the tech report and their benchmarking of various CPUs.

www.techreport.com
and browse to Articles => CPUs
Although they do not test Poser (alas), they do rendering tests with 3D Studio Max and POV-Ray. This can be really handy considering the huge range of CPU types, frequencies, bus speeds, numbers of cores, core revisions, etc.

For the user needing a cheap (actually FREE) alternate renderer option, there is POV-Ray. The latest (beta) version will run on 64-bit windows and will make use of dual cores to almost half the rendering times. Poser support comes from FlyerX's brilliant POSE-Ray tool. The latest incarnation of POSE-Ray is really quite easy to use and seems to get almost all of the textures and transparencies correct. I found that Poser 6 => POSE-Ray => POV-Ray was the only way I could get a few of my really large/complex scenes rendered, when Poser 6 just choked on the combined geometry and texture load of half a dozen millenium figures and a load of scenery and props.

The results from POV-Ray are not too bad either. Check following link if interested:

Example Pov-Ray render of P6 scene

Dual core P4s exist - the Pentium 4 D series. It has 64bit extensions, so it's able to run WinXP 64bit and the upcoming Windows Vista. Each core has its own L1 data cache, micro-op cache and L2 data cache. A good CPU. Dual core Athlon64s: each core has its own 64K L1 cache and 512K/1MB L2 cache, depending on the model. The 4200 and 4600 have 512K L2 cache per core, the 4400 and 4800 have 1 MB L2 cache per core. The Poser 5 benchmark by Jim Burton - results are in the Poser forum, a couple of months back - seemed to indicate that a large L2 cache is very beneficial to Poser. So the Pentium 4 D should perform well, as should the Athlon64x2 4400 and 4800. Prices: Athlon64x2 4400 should cost about $500, the 4800 about $900. Pentium 4 D series: 2.80 Ghz at about $250, 3 Ghz at about $350, 3.2 Ghz at about $600. Looks like Intel is undercutting AMDs pricing. Usually it's the other way around.

Vue 4 Pro and Vue 5 Infinite will make use of dual core CPUs. They see my P4 2.8 HTT machine as a 2 CPU machine, and will occupy the CPU for 100% And yes, Vue comes with 5 "RenderCows" that you can install on 5 separate computers. Those computers may be dual core or HTT, rendercows are counted by IP address.

Message edited on: 11/30/2005 16:44

Wow Jovial, that render is awesome. Can you post links for the POV and POSE ray software?

The newest Pentium is now a double core, unfortunately I forgot the name but for sure you will need big pockets.

Hi,

PoseRay is at:

http://mysite.verizon.net/sfg0000/Version 3.8.18 is really good but it has a glitch with very large/complex scenes. FlyerX made a fix but this hasn't been relased yet.

POV-Ray is at:

http://www.povray.org/I am using 3.6 (since I only have win32), the beta version for win64 is 3.7.

After installing, don't forget to configure PoseRay so that it knows where the POV-Ray exe is.

Here is how I use the tools:

1. Create scene in Poser 6 (Poser 5 has a bug that makes the .mtl file have the wrong references - so I'd advise against using Poser 5).
2. I don't create lights in Poser since PoseRay has some great lights - although they are a little bit harder to set up).
3. Export scene to wavefront obj file (and material .mtl file) into a new folder. PoseRay can also read .pz3 files BUT I have found it to be problematic with very complex scenes. FlyerX has indicated that he is working on a fix.
4. Load the object and material file into PoseRay.
5. Check all the material references. Occaisionally there will be an untextured material because it used shaders or perhaps a glitch. The POV-Ray material library has some nice effects for reflective metals, water, glass and clouds.
6. View the scene.
7. Set the main camera on the camera tab.
8. Create some lights on the lights tab. A small area light is good for giving softened/more-realistic shadows.
9. Save the scene as a new object (this saves your new material definitions, the camera and lights in new .obj and .mtl files).
10. Set the maximum mat texture size (e.g. 512 for test renders and greater than 2000 for the final render) and let these be copied/resampled to the working folder.
11. Use the POV-Ray tab to set the render settings and export a POV-Ray scene. It is best to do a quick low quality render with shadow to see if the brightness is correct and the shadows are where they need to be AND then do a high res, high quality render using radiosity for the production render.
12. POV-Ray starts automatically when the scene has been saved and it creates a .png file.

Issues:

• Don't think displacements are supported.
• Sometimes see a bit of banding of the shadows under V3 breast that make them look a little cylindrical, might need a bit of fiddling with fill lighting. Radiosity helps to reduce this.
• PZ3 reader in PoseRay doesn't yet do really complex scenes (yet).

Hope this helps.

svdl: Prices: Athlon64x2 4400 should cost about $500, the 4800 about $900. Pentium 4 D series: 2.80 Ghz at about $250, 3 Ghz at about $350, 3.2 Ghz at about $600. Looks like Intel is undercutting AMDs pricing. Usually it's the other way around. >>> Sure wish there were somone with those Intel chips to do a benchmark Poser trial. It "seems" they would do well, but it's only in the field trial with specific Poser environment that will tell the tale. I second the fact that the larger L2 is best for Poser. If another round of benchmarking ensues, there should be a new file to accompany Jim's current one, something with standared Poser6 models and features, like AO on materials and IBL lighting. ::::: Opera :::::

IIRC the new Intel is truly double core, meaning 2 - or a joined pair of - die in one package, versus AMD's product-specific dual core die. If so then Intel are really price cutting as costs should be higher, although each die may be smaller reducing yield losses. But my big concern would be the heat. Anyone seen info on Intel double-D versus AMD dual-core re heat?

I worry about heat too. I already have five fans in my fastest rig, two for the case, one each for the dual Raptors and of course one for the AMD 3500. I can the unit "Sikorski" ::::: Opera :::::

Have the same 5, plus the Northbridge 486-style fan plus the 2 in the P/S on my Athlon - but the unit is almost silent! Some work, and I occasionally have to service the 486 fan, otherwise ... bliss. Now if I could just silence the whirring of my laptop's HDD - it's the loudest thing in the office ;-) The trick was switching to the Antec P/S with integrated temperature related fan speed regulation - including the case fans. Plus substituting a big slow 80mm case fan for the CPU fan! CPU and motherboard temps went down 1F too :-)

Power consumption of AMD64x2 vs Pentium IV D: they seem to be comparable - both at about 110W maximum. Both AMD and Intel support dynamically clocking down. AMD claims that power consumption for the Atlon64x2 at its lowest clock rate is less than half of the P4 at its lowest clock rate. The heat issue is one of the reasons both Intel and AMD have gone the multicore road. A 10% increase in clock speed can result in a 30% heat increase. Running two cores at about 70% of the clock speed of a single core generates about the same amount of heat, while increasing performance (best case) by 40-50%. So I guess the heat generated by a P4 D 2.8 Ghz would be roughly equal to the heat generated by an ordinary P4 at 3.5 Ghz. Just a guess. By the way, the cores of the Athlon64x2 each have their own lane to the main memory, while the P4 D relies on a single northbridge. The AMD has a much higher maximum data transfer rate between CPU and main memory than the P4.