Hello Poser Pros. ... I recently picked up Apple's new MacPro 8-core machine and loaded it up with 9 gigs of RAM. I'm running 3D Max (64-bit) on XP-64 and couldn't be happier with how its working out. 

My question is how to leverage the 8-cores best with Poser. I actually have the computer set up as a quad-boot system using Apple's bootcamp. I can boot into either OSX, XP-32, XP-64 or Vista. Right now I've just been using Poser under XP-32 but have read here that people are successfully running it under XP-64 so I'll plan on installing it under that partition as well. I have Poser on the Mac partition but have mostly been using the PC version simply because most of my content right now is in the PC runtime directories and I'm not certain how much trouble it would be or whether it would even be possible to convert it all to the Mac.

Right now using the multi-threaded render option definitely improves the performance of Poser 7. I figured I would be able to simply install a second copy of Poser so I could run two renderers at the same time and, thus, use the extra processing power. Unfortunately, it appears this is not possible as the second copy doesn't boot as an independent app.

My questions are:

1. On the PC side is there a method to truly use all 8 processor cores at the same time for rendering with Poser? 

2. Is it possible to run two instances of the application at once? I suppose I can reinstall my old Poser 6 and run it at the same time as 7 but I really hoped to take advantage of the rendering speed update of 7.

3. Given this system, is there any advantage to moving over to OSX? I haven't tried to run multiple copies of Poser there. Anybody know about this?

Thanks as always.

Mark