I've been away from my internet access for a week or so and missed a lot of P7 discussion.  Has anyone with a pentium 4 HT tried to see if P7 will support hyperthreading? 

Yes, Poser 7 supports up to 4 render threads at a time now.  In the general preferences section.

 - Noel  

So an HT thread is handled just as well as a duel core?

As far as I can tell it is a true hyperthreaded application now.  Not just for dual core.

 - Noel  

awsome... thanks for the info

On my HT machine it uses 100% of the CPU in Task Manager (as opposed to 50% in all previous poser versions) and you see it rendering to different areas of the image at a time.  HOWEVER, towards the end it drops back down to 50% for some reason and basically kills any advantage.  I have timed renders with 2 and 4 threads (and also as a separate process) and the render times are IDENTICAL.  :(  

Actually, having in a seperate thread makes it a tad slower.

-Tim

Rendering time is limited by memory access time and not by CPU, so as all cores share the same RAM  it will not make a difference if you have one or 1,000 cores.

Hyperthreading won't make Poser render faster. It's still just one core masquerading as two - helpful in some areas, but rendering with Poser with multiple threads isn't one. You'll need some real core for that. And don't listen to kawecki, he doesn't seem to talk from experience ;-)

Quote - And don't listen to kawecki, he doesn't seem to talk from experience ;-)

And what kind of experience must I have????

Well, anyone using a multicore CPU with a multi threaded renderer will tell you that they render faster... You still claim that that's not true...

Render faster compared to what?, to another computer with one core Duron?
You must compare using the same CPU, the same motherboard, the same RAM and beware of XP that can you cheat you the result.

Carrara renders the same scene twice as fast with two cores. You're now probably going to tell me that that is because one core can only access the RAM with half speed...

Quote - Carrara renders the same scene twice as fast with two cores.
You're now probably going to tell me that that is because one core can only access the RAM with half speed...

Have you tested it with the same computer or the renders were made on two different computers?
It will also depend on the scene content. If you have a scene where no textures are used with exception of the background, a scene with only procedural shaders, this scene will render faster with many cores.

It's easy to benchmark.

• Use your dual core computer, set up a Poser scene (any scene).

• Before rendering, fire up the task manager, and set the "CPU affinity" setting of Poser to only one core (Process tab, right click on Poser). That way it only can use one core, because Windows won't give access to the other one.

• Render.

• Then check back the affinity for both cores, render again.

Compare times.