Hi !

i own Poser7 and a Pentium D960 CPU which is dula Core.
In panel setting, i can only set 4 thread in max number !
Does this limit is set by my CPU or it is for every one ?

Has i forecast to buy a core i7 hardware , so with 8 thread (4c + 4ht), i wonder if Poser7 (and poser7 pro) will use it ????

is there any people here who use more that 4 threads ?

thank for help.

I have the i7 and when I use Poser Pro I know that it takes advantage of all the threads.  Poser Pro has the same option for threads as Poser 7 (choosing up to 4).

Anyway, yeah, I did some test renders and checked out my processor workload and all threads were working.

What's great about Poser Pro (that you won't get with Poser 7) is that it is 64bit and thus will also access greater then 2GB of memory.  I have 6GB on my new machine and Poser Pro takes advantage of all of it!

(You then also need Vista 64 or XP 64).

Anyway, I hope this helps!

ohhh great ! you're the first one i knwo who own a core i7 and Poser Pro !

Do you know how lucky you are ?

Do you have Poser7 or only Poser Pro ?

great day !

I have two i7 systems, and neither ppro nor poser 7 will use more then 4 threads (you can open task manager to check this, if all 8 graphs are not at 95-100% then its not using them)

I also use Vue and XSI and both use all 8 and i get like 15-20% more performance as compared to 4 which is pretty good IMO.

Hopefully the next versions of poser will add support for this...

I could be mistaking, but if the graphs in the task bar are filling up, even if not at a high percentage, does that not mean they are being utilized?

I will admit, with Poser Pro (just double checked) my CPU usage is sitting at about 50% (where as a render with Carrara goes to 100% on all processors), but for the most part, it appears to still be spreading the workload out to all 8.

USAMIKE, is answer to your question, I have Poser Pro on my new machine.  I still have Poser 7, but I have left it on my older machine.  The big difference between the two is that Poser Pro has a 64bit render engine, thus allowing you to access greater then 2GB of memory - Poser 7 will not give you that same power.

Still, when you slice it down, Poser does not have the most efficient render engine around.  In doing speed tests, I have not been super impressed at the differences between my i7 and the AMD Dual Core laptop.  This is not the processor's faults, obviously, it is really the fault of the render engine!

Carrara, on the other hand?  Wow, big difference.

AFAIK most modern OSs will automatically move threads around so as to have even load on all cores rather then push any single one to 100%. So while FF may indeed be using all 8 cores, it's using them 4 at a time because that's how many threads it uses. So you dont get the performance benefit.

what i meant by "if poser can handle 8 cores" is, does the all core can work together in Poser7 during the rendering operation ? I know all the core are in use thanks to the OS.
So, when you have a 8 cores machine, does poser render like this :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esE2o3mMtog

in Poser, you can saw your scene 's been rendering in eight parts ?

I'm pretty certain that it's only the (64-bit) external renderer from PoserPro that works with more than 4 threads.
P7 only uses 4 threads.

I just run some CPU utilisation stats while doing a Poser render.

I outputted utilisation percentage of all the 8 processor threads of a 4-processor system once every second and examined them. Interesting results.

When using Poser7 in a "separate process, 4 threads" state, 4 processor threads were used leaving 4 idling, but the used threads were showing 90%-100% utilisation level.   

When using Poser7 in  only a "4 threads" state, up to 8 of the 8 processor threads (all 4 cores) were used at all times, but at significantly lower utilisation levels per thread (between 30% to 90%). And at almost every interval 1-2 threads were not utilised at all. I suspect the rendering I did was not giving enough of punch to use all the threads.

When using Poser7 in only a "2 threads" state, up to 4 of the 8 processor threads were used at all times (2 cores), but again at lower utilisation levels per thread.

When using Poser7 in only a "1 thread" mode, up to 2 of the 8 processor threads were used at all times (1 core), but again at lower utilisation level per thread (again between 30% to 90%).

Conclusion: since "1 thread" mode actually seems to use 1 processor core (both threads in it) and "2 thread" mode actually seems to use 2 processor cores (4 threads), it leads me to believe that Poser can actually use all the 8 threads that are available. "Threads" in the Poser general preferences therefore apparently means rather "cores" and it is up to the OS to deploy the work at hand at maximum efficiency.

This was just a rough test that outputted thread utilisation on 1 second intervals. On the other hand the maximum thread utilisation when "doing nothing" is at maximum 3% of up to 2 threads at the same time (mouse movement etc.) so I'm fairly certain that all the levels I saw were caused by Poser render and that only.

Just because an app is running in 4 threads does not mean it will only ever touch 4 cores.  Threads can be swapped between cores per step - you WANT this to happen, otherwise it could happen that a borked thread could make a whole core 100% busy until it is killed.  A given thread cannot be executed on more than one core per step though.  Poser 7 (and I'm pretty certain Poser Pro also) is capped at 4 threads - no matter how many cores you have, more than 4 won't improve render speed in an otherwise idle environment.

Optimal use of your CPU means the usage graphs are pegged at 100%.  In the i7 example above, the cores are very obviously not 100% :)

Quote - I'm pretty certain that it's only the (64-bit) external renderer from PoserPro that works with more than 4 threads.

Where'd you get that information?  I had thought the 4 thread limit was true for all versions of the renderer, that's a pretty good selling point if it's not true for the external renderer.

Keep in mind that the i7 is not a true 8 core CPU. It's 4 core with hyperthreading.

Hyperthreading means that instructions from two threads per core can be decoded and stored in the micro-instruction cache, so the actual execution units of the core can be utilized more efficiently. Hyperthreading will get you a 10%-20% performance increase over a non-hyperthreaded (but otherwise identical) system - if there are enough threads with enough workload.

Yep that's been my experience as well but since it's basically for free it's pretty good i think. It also works much better then the old P4 HT. Of course real 8 cores would be even better.

Also if there's still some confusion about this issue, this is what your i7 should look like, If it's not like that then its not using 8 threads:

Quote - ...Hyperthreading will get you a 10%-20% performance increase over a non-hyperthreaded ...

Yeh. That's one of the results I too got from my simple test above. Overall CPU utilisation (work done by all threads combined) was about 10-20% more using hyperthreading than without it (ie. when ticking the box "separate process", it basically apparently denies use of hyperthreading from the processor). Single threads operated at much lower efficiency, but the total work done exceeded that of using the cores without hyperthreading.

Quote -
Optimal use of your CPU means the usage graphs are pegged at 100%.  In the i7 example above, the cores are very obviously not 100% :)

Yes that's right. Should there exist an option for "8 threads" and "separate process" in the Poser preferences, I would imagine the rendering would use everything the CPUs could offer. Unfortunately that is not the case.

does poser (and poser pro) render the scene in 8 parts like cinebench10 can do it ?

Poser 7 does not appear to be doing so. It appears to be rendering in 4 parts.

My answer to your original question would be: yes all the 8 processor threads of a quad-core processor are being used during a rendering, but only 4 of those threads are spawned by Poser. The processor spawns extra threads to get the job at hand (assigned to it) done a little bit faster. A better rendering engine would take control of all the available threads and use them... now it just leaves lots of computing power underutilised.

As said by ghonma above, a software that spawns 8 threads would appear to be using all threads at utilisation levels nearing 100%.

Quote - does poser (and poser pro) render the scene in 8 parts like cinebench10 can do it ?

No. Poser( and poser pro)  is limited to 4 threads and thus render the scenes in 4 parts.
In addition, a thread goes to sleep when it finishes its part, making the multi-threading gain even lower.