hope this changes in 2012.  Was sort of bummed, but this sort of upgrade disappointment factor is typical and anticipated.

Did you set the edit:general preferences to render on 12 threads?  (Twelve, because the hex core is HyperThreaded).

Cameron has two of those HyperThreaded hex core processors, and she is smokin' fast, rendering on 24 threads.  I'm telling you, Poser Pro, PP2010, PP2012 love that hex processor. :D

I, like you, hope that PP2012 will make better use of more cores and more memory. This is the second decade of the 21st century. I want applications that can take advantage of the improved computer perfomance.

I have heard that there is some improvement in speed with transparancy. I certainly hope so.

lmk

Edit:

What computer or motherboard can use dual 6 core processors? I would love to look at the specs of that set-up and drool.

lmk

The thing is, when they improve render speed, at the same time they also add desirable new features that increase render time.

Honestly, I've seen that across the board in every single 3d application going on 25 years now, and I frankly never see it ending.

Quote - The thing is, when they improve render speed, at the same time they also add desirable new features that increase render time.

Honestly, I've seen that across the board in every single 3d application going on 25 years now, and I frankly never see it ending.

 

Is that bad? If you want to render faster in the new version, switch off the new features that increase render time and it'll be the same if they had improved render speed without adding the new features.

Quote - What computer or motherboard can use dual 6 core processors? I would love to look at the specs of that set-up and drool. lmk

  Dell and Boxx, among others I think, offer this.  You have to look at their professional/business workstations, not the gaming rigs. Cameron is a Boxx 8520, dual Intel Xeon X5680 HyperThreaded hex core processors @ 3.33 GHz.

  96 Gb of DDR3 memory @ 1333MHz

Intel 5520 chipset

nVidia Quadro FX5800G video card, 4.1 Gb on-board memory

     The only ID markings I see on the motherboard say "Super  X8DAi-BT009  rev:2.01"

Quote - Did you set the edit:general preferences to render on 12 threads?  (Twelve, because the hex core is HyperThreaded).

Cameron has two of those HyperThreaded hex core processors, and she is smokin' fast, rendering on 24 threads.  I'm telling you, Poser Pro, PP2010, PP2012 love that hex processor. :D

No, I had no idea such a thing was possible!  Let's try that and report back.

Is this hex thing only on Intel?

I'm on AMD Phenom 6-core.

Sigh - It takes so fracking long to calculate indirect lighting that any improvement on render speed is almost insignificant.

Still waiting to see.

I don't know about the Phenom hex;  it would be 6, unless it is HyperThreaded, in which case it would be 12.  I think if you look in Poser's general preferences, it will only show the options which exist for your machine, and it generally defaults to employing all available threads.  If the slider only goes to 6, then I would guess that the Phenom is a straight hex core.  If the slider goes to 12, crank that sucker all the way to the right!

Mine goes to 32.  I am skeptical. 

Like I said, a fast render is useless against an agonizing indirect light calculation :(

Quote - Sigh - It takes so fracking long to calculate indirect lighting that any improvement on render speed is almost insignificant.

Still waiting to see.

perchance you have transmapped hair in the scene? or glass? if so, turn off raytracing on the hair or hit up BB for a revised glass recipe....

Hee Hee...  pretty sure 32 won't do you much good.  Open the Task Manager (CTRL-Shift-Esc) and look at the performance tab.  You'll see one graph box for each thread;  just count them.  If you see six, the Phenom is a straight hex core.  If you see twelve, it's HyperThreaded.  Anyway, the number of CPU usage graph boxes is the number of threads you want to render.

Overlapping planes of transparency bog IDL down;  that's why I'm investing considerable time and effort into making a selection of trees which do not use transmapped foliage.

Okay.

6 is the correct answer.  Turning off raytracing on the hair is disappointing.  I thought my hiatus was over but my frustrations are rapidly returning. 

It can matter if you have bucket size set really large, because there will be some wasted processing when you're down to fewer buckets than you have idle cores, but other than that hyperthreading doesn't magically create more CPU.

Memory is common and shared by all cores, if your software has an intensive usage of memory, the memory itself becomes the bottleneck of the process and so, no matter how many cores or threads you use, one thread or core when wants to access memeory will have to wait doing nothing for the other cores release the memory

Quote - Memory is common and shared by all cores, if your software has an intensive usage of memory, the memory itself becomes the bottleneck of the process and so, no matter how many cores or threads you use, one thread or core when wants to access memeory will have to wait doing nothing for the other cores release the memory

Hmmm...good point.

Others know more than I, but you might also want to make sure that in your task manager, you select the render process and set its priority to "high". It seems to me that this change in setting reduces my render time even with little else running. Maybe that's an illusion.

Good luck

Quote - reduces my render time even with little else running. Maybe that's an illusion.

But your Windows is running with a lot of services eating your CPU and memory

In theory it would be great if you were able to put Windows and its all services in one core and leave the other cores free for your exclusive use, but you have no control on what and how Windows is doing and managing the cores.

The other big problem is even you have many cores available not everithing is a ble to be done in pararell. Some steps to be able to execute requires a result from a previous step and 100 cores will have the same result of one core.

For example, if you want to render Vicky you must first load her. You can assign a core for the rendering and another for the loading process, but the rendering core will do nothing until the loading core finsihed the Vicky loading process, then and only then can start the rendering process and and this time the loading core will do nothing because has nothing to do.

Some processes such as unbiased rendering are very suitable to be run in paralell and so more cores or computer clouds will produce a great result in rendering speed.

With unbiased renderers the rendered image is formed by the sum of randomly taken samples of the scene. One core can be taking one sample at some point and the other cores other samples at other points and all is summed over the time in a common memeory. More cores or computers you have, more samples are taken per second. The process goes forever until you stop when achieves the desired quality you wanted.

With other class of rendering, for example if you use shadow maps, you cannot start the rendering process before all the shadow maps were rendered. You can render all the shadow maps in paralell, but the rendering itself will have to wait until all shadow mpas are done.

This rhetoric is awfully close to "In reality, Multi-core processors are totally useless at all times."

If that's what we're hinting at here, I'm going to put my foot through my monitors.

Quote - This rhetoric is awfully close to "In reality, Multi-core processors are totally useless at all times."

Do you actually have six cores anyway?  What hardware is that exactly?

A simple test, if you have a multi core/multiprocessor machine: set threads to 1, and render something.  Set threads to number of actual physical cores you have, and render the same thing again.  It's not an additive increase in speed, it's less efficient the more cores you have, but I can say for certain that 4 is dramatically faster than 1 for me (I think it comes out to about 3.2 times faster).

Perhaps if we did a bit of scientific empirical testing.  Anyone who has a HyperThreaded processor can do this.  It is absolutely irrelevant if your processor is not HyperThreaded.

Set up a scene of sufficient complexity to simulate a real project.  Use reasonably high render settings.  You must not change anything between the test renders except the one variable in question.

Render 1:  set the render threads to the number of cores your processor has.  Render using the script partners: Dimension3D : render Firefly and click the render (time) button.

Render 2:  set the render threads to twice the number of cores.  Render (time).

Heh heh.  Crossposted with pjz99.  ^^  Some trivia of which everyone should be aware:  HyperThreads are second-class citizens, making use of otherwise wasted idle core time, so a HyperThread will only run at about 2/3 to 3/4 the speed of a primary core thread.  So, render speed certainly will not double, but the speed increase is worthwhile.

     The reason that a HyperThread is worthwhile is that each primary core is assigned a bucket, and some concentrated processor time is spent rendering that bucket, but there is also fetch and write time, and time during which that bucket is assembled and when it is discarded.  It is during these fetch times that the HyperThread steps in and uses that processor core.  So, no, H/T doesn't magically add cores;  but it does make more efficient and thorough use of the cores you have.

If you have a CPU gauge onscreen while rendering, you can look for unused processor capacity.  Ideally, the CPU usage should be pegged at 100% except at the end of a render phase (shadow calcs, IDL precalc, SSS precalc, main render).

AMD Phenom II X6 1075T 3GHz Socket AM3 Boxed Processor

This is what I have, PJ, along with asrock 890fx deluxe 5 motherboard, which is ready for an 8 core processor, should one become available.

your link is borked but I'll look it up, it's OK

And yes indeed that is a six core processor (at least according to the specs).  Set Poser's render threads to 1, vs. 6, and render each way and time it.  You can try setting it to higher numbers but I doubt that will have any useful effect.

Modern processors are designed and optimised for the average user runing an average application. To keep the average user happy, efficiency and performance was sacrificed. Depending on how you see, it are cheating you.

The result that you have will depend on what you are doing and the software you are using, you can be very happy with the results or very pissed of.

HyperThreading is creating a fake core, they are cheating making you believe that you have more cores. Hyperthreading use a part of the CPU that you are not using to run other thread that, of course, doesn't need the part you are using. If this is the case you will have with a lower cost the benefit of a processor with more cores. If is not the case and you are using all the CPU, hyperthreading is useless.

In the rendering example where you assigned a core for a rendering bucket, in theory for a well designed rendering engine with the right schedulling and pipelines there will be nothing left without use in the core. While one part is accessing memory all the arithmetic units are executing data in the pipelines. The core will be runing at full steam and hot temperature and hyperthreading will not work because there is nothing left iddle in the CPU.

On the other hand, if the rendering engine has not an efficient design, most of the time of rendering the bucket is spend calling subroutines and passing parameters and calling again another subroutine and so on, the CPU will have little use with a lot of iddle parts that can be used by hypethreading for doing other things. In this case hyperthreading can be useful.

I wonder if there are some diminishing returns as you add cores but someone else will be far more qualified to answer that.

I saw a massive difference when I moved from dual to Quad core with H/T,  both in rendering times and the size of scenes I could build without any problems.  However, It was part of a new system I built so, at the same time, I moved to 64 bit processing use the 64 bit render engine along 12Gig in triple mode (can't remember the correct term).

 When I look at the CPU usage during a render all 8 cores, physical and virtual, are in use except towards the end of a render when cores go into 'parked' mode.  I guess this is when there is nothing less to do and they are waiting on the other cores to finish.

 I am no expert but I am sure someone else will be able to give some idea which had the most impact on my render times but I have to say I am very happy with the system and I cannot wait to see what happens when I load Poser 2012.

Yes, there are diminishing returns in adding more cores, but thats due to problems in the microarchitecture not in software.

Expect Intel to first update the aging hex-cores to current technology, then shrink the whole range to get even more speed but after that the chips are expected to get a complete redesign to support 8 cores + hyperthreading.

AMD are doing the same but in reverse order. The new design first, (16 core 'server' chips started shipping a few days ago) then they will try catching up with the 'shrinking'.

TinkerBell has a 3.2 GHz quad core.  Galadriel has a 3.2 GHz quad core which is HyperThreaded.  Galadriel consistently outruns TinkerBell when I'm doing test renders (same scene at same size and same render settings on each computer, of which I've doing a lot recently).

Cameron, with two 3.2 GHz HyperThreaded hex core processors,  outruns anything else I've ever had.

For rendering, a HyperThreaded dual core is not the equal of a quad core, but it is considerably better than a plain dual core.

As an AMD fanboy it pains me to say this.  AMD processors are not been as fast and productive as Intel processors for the last few years.  If you have Quad core Intel system that is less then 5 years old you probably wont see any improvement going to an AMD Phenom II Hex core.

Compare cpu's at www.cpubenchmark.net

Quote - As an AMD fanboy it pains me to say this.  AMD processors are not been as fast and productive as Intel processors for the last few years.  If you have Quad core Intel system that is less then 5 years old you probably wont see any improvement going to an AMD Phenom II Hex core.

They pretty much never have been but they've pretty much always been a lot cheaper so nobody minds.

Quote - As an AMD fanboy it pains me to say this.  AMD processors are not been as fast and productive as Intel processors for the last few years.  If you have Quad core Intel system that is less then 5 years old you probably wont see any improvement going to an AMD Phenom II Hex core.

LOL Its not quite that bad!

The 1100 X6 is about the equivalent of a previous generation i7-920 or 930.

In terms of todays Intels its roughly equal to the current i5-2500 

Quote - I saw a massive difference when I moved from dual to Quad core with H/T,  both in rendering times and the size of scenes I could build without any problems.

The problem is how you do the comparison, you are not comparing two with four cores. When you moved to quad cores, you had a new processor with a new processor design, a new motherboard with a new chip set, faster memory with greater memeory bus speed and more memory and moving from 32 to 64 bit software also can be significative.

Every time you buy a new computer or processor + motherboard it will run faster than the previous older one. If you buy today a new computer you will not be able to find a single one that has less than four cores, all are multicore today.

If in 2013 fabricants decide to redesign the processor and return to only one core, it also will run faster. This will not mean that a single core run faster that eight cores, it only will mean that a 2013 processor runs faster than a 2011 processor

I am disappointed with the new processors, for me the best processor design was Pentium I MMX, but it doesn't mean that I shall return to use it just because my Athlon II X2 3GHz runs 15 times faster than my old Pentium I MMX 200 MHz.

I make software, I optimize the software in speed. The problem is how to compare the speed of software if everytime you are using a different processor ?

The only way to compare is to have some measurement unit that is independent of the processor you are using. You cannot measure the time because a 3.3 GHz processor always will give less time than a 2.4 GHz processor.

The unit that is independent of the processor you are using and its speed is the processor clock. I measure the speed of a piece of code in number of CPU clocks that takes to execute this piece of code and the result that I get it will not matter if I running Windows 7, XP or Linux.

More than ten years ago I did some software and optimized it to make the critical parts run as faster as I could. I used that time my old Pentium I MMX-200 MHZ. Time has passed, had new computers and the processors improved with new features, 3dNow, SSE, SSE2 and so on.

Two years ago I decided to re-write my old code using new resources of the new processors. SSE/SSE2 are very useful for 3d applications, in this way I could have a piece of code that will be able to run (in clock units) even much more faster than my old code.

My first big surprise was when I measured the speed of my old code running a modern computer. The result should have been less clocks to execute the piece of code, because modern CPU have more execution units, or at least to have the same speed. But it was not, the speed of the modern CPU was much slower executing the same piece of code.

I re-wrote the code using all the power of the new features of modern CPUs, optimised, but I was only able to achieve the same speed (in clock units), but not faster.

In resume, the 2010 piece of code running a 2010 CPU has the same speed as the 2000 code running a 2000 CPU. And I am using now powerful resources that were not available in 2000.

The reason of all this I can explain, but it would be a long technical discussion.

Interesting Breakdown.  I always thought it was odd that something written in 1995 runs about the same as it does in 2012 regardless of the version. 

No matter how much you improve the hardware, you're still looking at an hourglass on a photoshop filter execution.  Same software, same filter, same image, same hourglass.

Could it be that all this shit is the same as it ever was and they just keep renaming it and rebranding it to pretend it's an advancement?

I mean hard drives are still the same size, physically, and can hold 500 times what they used to?  Hmmm...

1. AMD does not do hyperthreading. Six core = six threads, not twelve.

2. Do remember that the Phenom II may be new for you, but it's old tech at the end of its product cycle. A good Sandy Bridge quad core will likely kick its butt.

3. At the same time, don't get sucked into the "benchmarking" tests that almost always give Intel the superiority. Very few benchmarks are geared toward things that really benefit from having a lot of cores, and rendering is one of those things. (And software will gradually get optimized for multiple cores, so having lots of cores is good future-proofing.)

AMD is set to release Bulldozer in the next couple months, with an 8-core available. It will be interesting to see how it performs in this battle.

kawecki: absolutely not true that all new computers are at least quad core. In fact, both Intel and AMD still manufacture and market older generation tech - you can still buy e.g. Pentium CPUs on brand new machines. (Why anyone would, given how better stuff has come down in price, is another question.)

Quote - kawecki: absolutely not true that all new computers are at least quad core. In fact, both Intel and AMD still manufacture and market older generation tech - you can still buy e.g. Pentium CPUs on brand new machines. (Why anyone would, given how better stuff has come down in price, is another question.)

I am still doing software for the Intel's 8085 and the 8085 (8 bit 1985's microprocessor) is still being manufactored by a lot of frabricants and used in a great number of products. And in other application where is required more processing power I am using the Intel's 8088, a 16 bit processor with 8 bit bus.

Quote - Could it be that all this shit is the same as it ever was and they just keep renaming it and rebranding it to pretend it's an advancement?

In many cases, yes it is. Almost all of the marvelous new technological products are based on a 100-150 years old theory. A fresh released product that you think that is something new and revolutionary is nothing more than a 50 years old conception. Is common to fabricats release a 20 years old product with a new layout and people to believe that is something new.

What really has changed is that products can be very small, the speed of digital electronics improved hundred or thousand times and the most important, the cost. It are very cheap today, so everyone can have it.

Products are conceived and created, but many times its cost is very high, very few people will be able to buy it and so, the product is never released to the market. 30 years later someone finds in the dusty archives the project and find that can be manufactored by reasonable cost and the product is rteleased to the market and propaganda makes believe people that is something new and revolutionary. And many products created today will have to wait 20 or 30 years waiting for the drop of its cost.

Techological advances

You have a house, the house has many lights and you have several light switches in the wall to turn on/off the lights. The switches are mechanical assemblies, even not complicated have its cost. You need wires to conect the switches to the lamps, as you have many lamps and many switches you will need lot of meters of wires runing inside the wall and someone to make the electrical installation. All has its cost.

Today microprocessors are very cheap, you have for less than a dollar. You replace the mechanical electic switches by a piece of rubber or plate for touch button, put a microprocessor and send the on/off information by radio waves to the lamps that have a receiver and electronic swith in its sockets. You don't need to have lot of wires running inside the walls, you haven't to pay the wires. The switches or keypad are very much cheaper and the electrical installation becomes very simple, you need less people to make the work and need less qualified workers for the task, so you hire less people and pay them less.

As you use now a microprocessor, you have some processing power, so you can add timers, 20 programings and many things more for zero cost. If you want the light-pad, that once were switches, can calculate elliptic integrals. Other fabricant can offer Bessel functions, and all for a cost much less than the conventional and obsolete electrical installation.

Question: Is it a technological advance ?

[qoute

The problem is how you do the comparison, you are not comparing two with four cores. When you moved to quad cores, you had a new processor with a new processor design, a new motherboard with a new chip set, faster memory with greater memeory bus speed and more memory and moving from 32 to 64 bit software also can be significative.

Fair point, I was tending to concentrate on the processor rather than the whole system which is not only an elementary mistake but even more surprising considering the research I did to match the system components.    What particularly pleased me was I had the extra speed but not at the cost of increased noise as the system is quite quiet in use, which was another reason for the research.  Render speed is important of course buy better previews and reduction in sound and power consumption are all benefits.

William_the_bloody, have a look in you BIOS with regard to the manufacturer's specs for the hardware.  I gained a huge improvement by just matching the RAM speed and timings.  Also, go ahead and raise the multiplier for the CPU, these Phenoms love to overclock.  I'm running 4.0 GHz on air right now.  Gonna go much higher as soon as I get around to building a water cooling loop with an active heat exchanger.  But I digress.

 As to the Phenoms being older tech, that is definitely true.  I noticed the Phenom doesn't run much faster than my older Athlon II (also optimized and O/C'ed) with day-to-day stuff, but they run fast enough that the CPU isn't the bottleneck, usually it was load times from the drive.  But I stuck with AMD because dollar-for-dollar the brute strength of 6 real cores added with the overclock headroom seemed more beneficial than the Intel tricks to beat benchmarks.  Use the "Render Firefly" script and don't go nuts with settings like pixel samples and light bounces and your render times should go down.  Running the CPU faster than the Athlon and having the extra cores really helped me with multi-threaded activities like rendering.  Also, as far as I know, rendering is the ONLY thing Poser does multi-threaded.  Also, leave your render threads at 6.  Since the Phenoms aren't hyperthreaded, any threads over 6 will have to wait until the first ones are finished.  I found that actually slowed me down a bit.  Good luck!