The actual thread that explains this is back about message #100 "How fast is a P4 Anyway", the PZ3 file (caled CPU Test) is in Freestuff if you would like to see how your computer stacks up. You load the file and you time the render, that simple. Anyway, here are the results posted by members, sorted. As the question was "How fast is a P4 ..", I would have liked to see more P4 results, we only had two, would have liked to see some more of the faster Celerons, too, I think they make a 1.2 now, don't they? We have plenty of Athlon results, though. Sorted fastest to slowest, faster is better! AMD 1800+ Athlon 512 Mb RAM Win XP Home 037 seconds AMD XP 1800+, 1GB DDR RAM, WinXP 044 seconds AMD 1.4 Ghz Athelon, 768 Mb RAM, Win 2000K - 044 seconds. AMD 1.4 Ghz Athelon 768 Mb RAM, Win 98 048 seconds AMD 1.3 GHz 256meg RAM Win 98 048 seconds Pentium 4 1.7Ghz 384RDRAM WinME 063 seconds Pentium 4 1.9 Ghz 1Gb RAM Win XP 057 seconds AMD XP 1800+ 1 GB DDR Windows 2000 Pro 068 seconds AMD 1700+ (Dual) 1Gb DDR Win XP Pro 073 seconds Pentium 3 850 Ghz 512 Mb RAM Win 98se 081 seconds Pentium 3 1GHz, 512 MB RAM, Windows XP Home 081 seconds. AMD 800 Mhz Athlon 768Mb Ram Win XP Pro 085 seconds Pentium Celeron 600 Mhz 256 Mb RAM Win 2000 Pro 095 seconds AMD 1.0 Ghz Athlon 768Mb RAM Win XP Pro 106 seconds AMD 1..0 Ghz Athelon 512 MB RAM Win98SE 107 seconds AMD 1Gb Athlon, 256Mb Ram, Win 98. 108 seconds AMD ? K6 146 Mb RAM 115 seconds Pentium 3 800MHz, 128MB RAM, Win98 134 seconds Pentium 3- 525Mhz 256 Mb RAM, Win 98 178 seconds Mac G3-500 Mhz 768 Mb RAM ? 215 seconds Mac G3-400 Mhz 256 Mb RAM O.S. 9.0.4, 343 seconds Mac G4 500 Mhz 832 Mb RAM O,S. 9.2.2 476 seconds No, I don't know why there is such a big variance, either.

I did the test on my system, Dual 1.2Ghz Athlon MP, with 1GB of DDR RAM, 64mb Hercules Video Card, Win 2000

Rendered Non-Anti-alias = 17 sec
Rendered w/ Anti-alias = 35 sec

1.0 Ghz Pentium 4 with Radion Video card 90 seconds

Very interesting! P3 1 Ghz 256Mb Ram, Win 98, 70 seconds. Several years ago I tested render time with the little status guy sidestepping across the progress bar. On an older machine (P1, 166 Ghz, 64 MB) he was costing me about 4-5 seconds a minute. I renamed the extension on the little avi file (seems like it may have been named status.avi or something similar) and he disappeared. Poser works fine and my renders are faster, plus I found him annoying. If anyone is interested I can check this out at home tonight and provide more details. Sorry if this old news.

Damn, time to get me a new computer. :D

Bo is correct. The name of the file is "status45.AVI" and can be found in the following folder: C: ... ... Poser4Runtimescripts This is the movie of the little dancing guy that entertains you while your picture is rendering. He also eats up processing power and time so your picture takes longer to render. That is, it renders more slowly. What you can do ... If you change the filename from "status45.AVI" to "status45.AVI" (just "rename" and add an underscore ("") to the beginning of the filename) This makes it easy to find and, also, very easy to change it back if you ever want to do this. Now, when you render, Poser can't find the .AVI file and does not "play" the movie. Your renders will go faster. cheers, dr geep ;=]

Remember ... "With Poser, all things are possible, and poseable!"

cheers,

dr geep ... :o]

edited 10/5/2019

Hardware: Dell Inspiron 8100, P3-mobile processor @ 1GHz, 384MB RAM, GeForce2Go 32MB. Software involved: Win2k Pro w/ SP2, Poser4 Pro Pack Active progs running: Poser4 Pro, Netscape 6.2 and the Windows file explorer. TSR's running: Winamp agent, Novell network client, Active Desktop. Time: 132 seconds. /P

Oh, render time w/o the little dancing guy (same conditions) = 123 sec. I shaved about 9 seconds off the render with the .avi disabled. Not bad... /P

I accidentally rendered it both times in a seperate 1024x768 window... was that intentional? /P

Yes, it was, the PZ3 should have automatically called out the render size in a seperate window and turned on a-a and stuff. I had it open in a tiny window to suit all screens. If course it will render faster if you change things, but the real purpose is to see how one CPU compares against another in Poser. I'm sort of suprized at: How good the AMDs 1.3 and over do in Poser (mine is the 1.4 that did 44 and 48 seconds, but many others got similar results). Mine is fast enough that I seldom bother with non-antialiased renders, for example. How poor the Macs do - mine is the one second from last. Especially after all the Mac speed hipe they put out. Don't get me wrong, I like Macs, but they are not a good choice for Poser.

Re. the AMD's - I'm not suprised at all. On most benchmarking and 3rd-party hardware news sites, the benchmarks on the Athlons usually beat the crap out much faster P4 chips, especially in the video-intensive performance departments. Heck, it's been this way since the old AMD K6/2 chips came out. Also, P4's have a horrendous latency problem (though a lot of it should have cleared up after Intel added DDR memory ability to their mobo chipsets... Rambus amplified the latency troubles big-time, and Rambus was all you could get w/ a P4 for the first year or so.) HTH to explain a little as to why the numbers shape up like they do... /P

AMD 900 128 or 256 meg memory, ati raedon 32meg ddr on win 2k time : 62 seconds

165 seconds - PIII 500Mhz, 384mb RAM, Win98SE (no difference with renderman anim disabled). Thanks for hosting the experiment, Mr Burton. It's life, Jim, but not as we know it as a social one. ;-)

Penguinisto wrote: ...Athlons usually beat the crap out much faster P4 chips, especially in the video-intensive performance departments. Video (data handling and processing) is one area where the P4s are consistently particularly good in comparison to the Athlons. The Athlons beat the P4s on raw number crunching (due to their superior floating point performance), and raw number crunching is what Poser makes use of when it is rendering (as does Bryce, Max, etc). The P4s are also good where programs are written to take advantage of their successful features - Lightwave7 is one 3D app that now renders much faster on a P4. Owners of P4s and Athlons (and current Macs) can all be satisfied that they have highly capable computers that make the pro workstations of just two years ago look like steam engines.

Here's another: Athlon 2000XP 1G ram Visiontek GeForce 3 64 Win 2K 24 seonds.

67 Seconds
1GHz Athlon (Old Slot A)
192 MB PC133
Creative GeForce 2MX 32MB
20 GB Maxtor 7200rpm
Windows 2K Pro
No running man
32 Bit color

So my system is as fast as the AMD XP 1800+ 1 GB DDR?

Don't know about these results. I wonder what factors are really at work here.

"Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance." - H. L. Mencken

Glad to see the Athlons stomping everything. Now maybe people will realize I'm not kidding when I say AMD makes a better processor. :) (For sake of interest, I use a P3, the last good Intel cpu. And yes, I'm blunt.)

I dont even use poser but I can't help but chime in here about how I think that AMD is the best. :)

I posted the 37 second score with my Athlon 1800+ and the 81 second score with my P3 850. I just wanted to point out that the Athlon has DDR RAM and both machines have had the AVI side-stepping man turned off for weeks.

BTW - I realized that one thing that affects performance is your monitor specs... For example, I use UXGA instead of VGA (it's a laptop), w/ 119 pixels/inch. I suspect that render times on a standard SVGA monitor would be much faster :) Oh, and PJF: You're right - I had misstated things... I hadn't seen the benchmarks for about 6 months, but a quick check at Tom's Hardware (http://www.tomshardware.com) bears you out. Thank you for the correction. /P

The other strange thing is how many of us seem to be on AMD chips, unless the Pentium 4 guys are holding back ;-) I mention this because all you seem to see advertised is Pentium 4 mahines, or Celerons for the low end. I built my own, I gather most of us did, rather that buy an already set up box. One downside of the faster AMDs though, they are really "hot chips", in both meanings of the word, and they do require a often very loud cooling fan, or several of them. I'd give up a little speed for a little less noise, P4s might be better choices that way. I think the newer AMDs are a little better than the ones like mine, though.

first machine 35 seconds amd 1800 1 gig ram geforce 3 64 megs win xp second machine 1 min 55 seconds celeron 700 128 ram video? unknown but a cheapy win xp

"I built my own, I gather most of us did, rather that buy an already set up box" Well, I don't have the skills to build my own and had to buy what I could get off the shelf. Quite frankly, the relatively small selection of Athlon pcs that were available sucked (Celeron's and Durons were all over the place, but I wasn't interested in those). Small cases, small hard drives, no CDRW (more often than I would have thought), crappy integrated video cards using shared memory, etc. I bought a whole computer, not a processor. The Athlon choices I was given just weren't up to par. It would have cost me a mint to upgrade to match the other features of the P4 I choose (there wasn't a PIII to be found btw...only in laptops). I actually priced it out for the best Athlon I could find and would have had to spend $160 more to make it otherwise comparable...plus all the time and effort to change all the hardware. Then I'd have the joy of having that unused hardware reminding me a big chunk of money was spent for them to sit there and do nothing. Truly not worth it for a few seconds rendering time. I use my PC for lots of things, not just 3D work, and it performs great for everything I do. Anyway, I don't really care if some Athlons "beat" my computer, my computer beat some Athlons too. Big deal--it does what I want it to do and I'm happy so that's all that matters :)

I know this has been mentioned before, but for those who don't know, your video card has absolutely nothing to do with your rendering time as far as Poser is concerned. The cheapest 256kb ISA card (if they ever even made them) should theoretically perform as well as the lastest GeForce 4 in Poser. Everywhere else, a good video card makes a difference but not here. And another thing..... There is a certain satisfaction that comes from building your own computer using components of your own choosing and then seeing it perform at levels well beyond those of the "off the shelf" systems costing twice as much. "Can we build one for you?"....LMAO!

I'm bummed out. My dual 533 G4 Mac was soooooo slow at rendering the file I gave up at 5 minuts!!! Hopefully Poser 5 will support Altivec instructions on the Mac side when it comes out.

And now, for a benchmark at the other end, Whimpypooter (P2/133Mhz/32Mb/W95) spit that puppy out in a swift 1970 seconds! (No kidding - 32 min. & 50 sec.)

Poor, poor whimpypooter..... You must have had the AVI guy on.

Wow, at least I'm not dead last. 615 seconds on an iMac G3/233Mhz/160mb/OS9.2 I'm gonna go turn off my dancin' guy now. I need a beer.

Dell Latitude C600 laptop PIII, 750 MHz 256 Mb RAM Windows 2000 Pro 98 seconds. Not bad considering the fact that I had other applications open as well. I have ordered a 2.2 GHz Pentium 4 machine, guess that will speed things up a bit ;-)

It is actually not that hard to build your own, and yes there is a certain satisfaction in doing it, the only real scary thing is what if it doesn't work the first time you fire it up? If it gets down to you don't know if it is the motherboard or the memory or the graphcs card or the cpu and they all came from different places you have a major problem! I've built all of mine since my 386, though, including three 486s, 3 Pentiums and now an AMD. I only had one that didn't fly the first time, a bad motherboard that I finally convinced the vendor wasn't some kind of a setup problem. Building your own lets you do partial upgrades too, I even upgraded from a AMD 1.1 to a 1.4 before I really got it in service, the chip was only $125 then (more now).

Amazing, removing that silly dancing guy sure made a difference. My rendertime changed from 43 seconds to 37 seconds. (finally the same score as Johnnydnh :-))))

I've built my own computers, for the most part. Yes, you get more control, get the satisfaction etc. But you end up being your own technical support department. If something goes wrong, you're on your own. A year or so ago, I got the bright idea to update the BIOS on my AMD K62-400. Two weeks later I brought it into a local computer shop. To make a long story short, I ended up with an (ugh) Intel Celeron motherboard, with all those nasty builtins (video, network, sound, etc.) I had worked hard to buy the humble parts I had. Those parts were given to me in a box. I could have gotten a brand new, more powerful computer for what I paid to "have this fixed." I haven't had the resources to try rebuilding another computer. Let's not be too quick to recommend that someone go out and build their own computer. Or, at least, let's tell them some of the cold hard realities, and possible pitfalls. Ron

Buying your own computer is great, but it only works when you are able to do your own support. But most people are not. Those people had better buy a Dell or something like that. A compromise is to choose all components of your machine, but to let the local computer store build it for you. Marc

Great idea. If I understand correctly Dell allows you to do just that!

Not quite. I'd like a Athlon XP instead of a P4 :-))) But indeed Dell gives you quite a lot of room to make your own choices.

Pentium 4 1.7 GHz, 256 MB RAM, 67 seconds

Congrats Mjtdevries! What was the fastest Dell computer? Since they're so excellent they should be right at the top of the list right? And if they seem to be a bit slower than our home-built rigs, maybe their fine and indispensable technical support people can enlighten us as to why this is so? Dell has an easy payment plan too...only $90.00 per month for 48 months (with your good credit) and you can get one built for you! Oh, that doesn't include the extended 3 year service plan, but for a few bucks extra, they can roll that into your installment plan. Imagine paying $90.00 a month in that 4th year. It would be like owing over $1,000 on a 4 year old computer! Like P.T. Barnum said "There's a sucker born every minute" None for me thanks.

Dell does not use any AMD processors. So they can't have been at the top of the list because those were Athlon XP 1800+ machines :-))) As I said I before I prefer homebuilt for my own computers too, but if I was going to buy or advice a brand PC, then I'd choose Dell over Compaq, IBM, HP and such. Or the alternative I suggested, if you have a good computer shop nearby.

BTW, to the guy with a 500 Mhz G4 and 800+M RAM: My 300 Mhz G4-enhanced 7500 with 240M RAM rendered the scene in exactly the same time (476 seconds). Just got my 128M stick in the mail this morning, had to test it out.

There is a certain satisfaction that comes from building your own computer using components of your own choosing and then seeing it perform at levels well beyond those of the "off the shelf" systems costing twice as much. "Can we build one for you?"....LMAO

Speaking as someone who built my own systems for years and still do when a client wants something hyper custom I can safely say this...

These days I buy my systems from Dell when I am looking for big iron or eMachines when I am looking for budget. It simply isn't worth the time any more to match the components, track down all the pricing and put it all together and troubleshoot. I like the eMachines BTW - they use off the shelf parts, the price is good and we have 4 in service that have never given us any problem - 24/7/365 for a few years in some cases.

Is there any satisfaction to it? I suppose - but not after a while... it simply gets kind of old :) I think I've built a hundred or more over the years and I have to tell you the thrill is just plain gone.

3 weeks ago we realized here we were going to be WAY short on processor power for our project. I >COULD< have spend 3 days building new boxes and saved some cash up front but I would have lost more money than that in billable time. Instead we hit Dell at 3 a.m. got our credit approval in 10 minutes and had 2 high end boxes pre-configured for DVD writing in 3 days or so... and I could do billable work in the meantime.

When the machines got here they were in service in under an hour - no driver hassles and it all just WORKED. Could I have saved some up front money? Sure. Would it have been useful? Not by a long shot.

The credit? Yeah, the rate is steep... but we will pay them off in 15 days or so when we bill this client for the time and the extra work we can get done. A short term instant business loan in my books :)

Most of my clients run Dell's as well if they are in production environments. When and IF something dies they replacement part ships in 12 hours usually if they need it fast. They save money on downtime as well.

So, if you have the time to spend on the homebuilding it's a fun hobby in my mind... but when you're doing the dance of billable hours I put it away with most of my hobbies.

For similar reasons we run Intel chips here. Yeah, the AMD is a good chip and has some speed in some cases, but on optimized software we are VERY happy with our P4's and P3's. When we need to encode video (and we do a lot of that) then it is a godsend to have the speed. Oh, and the Intel chips don't catch fire if the fan falls off :)

My results:

1.8 ghz P4 with 512mg RDRAM.

My poser times sucked. Of course I didn't clean boot the box... I have too much stuff happening. Task Manager shows 53 processes running including Outlook and Photoshop. It took Poser 1:53 seconds or 113 seconds total. Beats the heck out of me why. I suspect some oddities in Poser  and this task load.

As a side note: 3D Studio Max ran the test (I matched the lights as well as I could and turned shadows on) in 11 seconds flat on the same machine with the same task load (right after I closed Poser).

So I'll be rendering in Max from now on :)

Soulhuntre, I had my rig put together and running within 4 hours so its doubtfull you're saving all that much time with Dell or e-machines setup. I would be interested in seeing a screen shot of your task manager displaying the 53 items that are running in the background. Based on your render time, it seems that you would have been perfectly happy with the performance of a properly configured PIII 450. But then again, you would lose the certain satisfaction that comes from spending $2,500.00 on a new computer. You also mentioned e-machines. Aren't those throw-away boxes in that they can't be upgraded? You recommend them? I noticed that Dell and e-machines are underscored and highlighted in your post. Are those direct links to their advertising pages? To be fair, you should post a link there to take them here to see the results of our tests. I just clicked on them....they ARE links! How much are they paying you?

Girls, take your pillow fight somewhere else.

Hmmm... a little hostility there? I am not sure what you're so upset about...

Anyway, taking your points in order...

"I had my rig put together and running within 4 hours so its doubtfull you're saving all that much time with Dell or e-machines setup."

Did that include selecting the pieces, picking or ordering the parts, the assembly and load out itself and some sort of burn in testing? If so your faster than I am and more power to you :)

"I would be interested in seeing a screen shot of your task manager displaying the 53 items that are running in the background."

I said processes. If you look at yours you will find a bunch there as well... there is a distinct difference between user programs and processes. But you knew that :) Usually I have 8-10 IE windows, Outlook, Photoshop and Max or Poser.

"Based on your render time, it seems that you would have been perfectly happy with the performance of a properly configured PIII 450."

I have a few of those, and I sure wasn't happy I promise. The render times on them aren't what I need for the work we do... our current project needs more than a  hundred thousand frames of animation. The most important thing this becnhmark pointed out was how invalid Poser seems to be as a benchmark - look at the variations in the results and you will see that raw CPU horsepower seems to be far from the only factor. I am sure if I shut everything else down it would be better - but I don't really have the time (in outlook alone I have 15 pending email replies in progress... if I close Outlook I have to save them all then remember to open 'em back up etc.).

"But then again, you would lose the certain satisfaction that comes from spending $2,500.00 on a new computer."

I don't have any. My personal satisfaction doesn't come from the box or how much I paid for it. My satisfaction comes from what the box does for me, and whether I get it all done on time and at a profit. The boxes I buy and recommend do that... that is satisfying I suppose. If I wanted to draw personal satisfaction from the things I own there are better options than my PC, I change it every 6 months or so anyway.

"You also mentioned e-machines. Aren't those throw-away boxes in that they can't be upgraded?"

Well that depends on how you mean. We sure don't throw them away - they see service as web servers, file servers and render farm boxes. Some run broadcasters for streaming video and audio and so on. One is a dedicated SQL server box.

The thing I like about eMachines is that they use standard parts in fairly standard boxes. I haven't needed an upgrade I couldn't; put in. Video card swaps, adding HD, adding CD-ROM, upgrading sound and so on. If I wanted to replace the MB I could probably do it, worst case is I have to buy a new case and transfer the parts.

Then again, we don't upgrade like that. When a machine is too slow for front line production we put it in service on the second line as a server and so on. That's one of the reasons we have 5 systems in service now without having a huge budget. Not everything needs a front line box.

"You recommend them?"

Yup, when they are appropriate. I have clients, friends and relatives with them. I own them myself. it's a good inexpensive box from a good company. Why wouldn't I recommend them?

I would not recommend a brand I have had trouble with. Compaq comes to mind. Proprietary components, no OS upgrade path and missing drivers for newer OS's... bad tech support and odd configurations. Not me buddy.

"I noticed that Dell and e-machines are underscored and highlighted in your post"

The term is "link".

"Are those direct links to their advertising pages?"

No, those are direct links to the home pages of the companies I mentioned. Yes, those pages have advertising... they also have technical information and forums where you can see what other people say about them. The beauty of the web is that when you mention something you can link in other sources of information so the people reading your text can do some checking on their own :)

"To be fair, you should post a link there to take them here to see the results of our tests."

I suppose I could, except I am not sure what the point would be and I am not active in those forums. Why don't you go do it if it upsets you so much?

"I just clicked on them....they ARE links!"

Glad to hear it! I went to all the trouble to make them links so it's good to see that it all works the way it is supposed to. I hope you weren't too surprised.

"How much are they paying you?"

    Millions. in fact I don't have a regular job... Dell pays me millions of dollars so that I can sell a few more machines for them by posting good things bout them. It's all a plot to trap you. Curses, you foiled the plan!

Seriously, I am not sure what you seem so torqued about. I just posted my experiences with the tools I use. Yeah, I said good things about a vendor I like - I do that with anything I think deserves my support. If it is good I let folks know when it is relevant. Ah well, not worth fighting about.

"The most important thing this becnhmark pointed out was how invalid Poser seems to be as a benchmark - look at the variations in the results and you will see that raw CPU horsepower seems to be far from the only factor" Ha! That is one way to look at it, another is sometimes real world results don't always meet are expectations! I wish we had some results for Celeron 1200s or 1300s though, I bet they would stack up pretty well against the more expensive Pentium 4s. I wonder how many of the store bought machines use DMA 99 hard drives that are actually running as such, for example. Anyway, here is most of the above added to the list. ******************************************* CPU, Speed, Amount of RAM, Operating System, time AMD 2000XP 1G RAM Win 2K 024 seconds AMD 1800 Mhz 1GB Ram Win XP 035 seconds AMD 1800+ Athlon 512 Mb RAM Win XP Home 037 seconds AMD XP 1800+, 1GB DDR RAM, WinXP 044 seconds AMD 1.4 Ghz Athlon, 768 Mb RAM, Win 2000K - 044 seconds. AMD 1.4 Ghz Athlon 768 Mb RAM, Win 98 048 seconds AMD 1.3 GHz 256meg RAM Win 98 048 seconds Pentium 4 1.7Ghz 384RDRAM WinME 063 seconds Pentium 4 1.9 Ghz 1Gb RAM Win XP 057 seconds Pentium 4 1.7 GHz, 256 MB RAM, 067 seconds AMD XP 1800+ 1 GB DDR Windows 2000 Pro 068 seconds Pentium 3 1 Ghz 256Mb Ram, Win 98, 070 seconds. AMD 1700+ (Dual) 1Gb DDR Win XP Pro 073 seconds Pentium 3 850 Ghz 512 Mb RAM Win 98se 081 seconds Pentium 3 1GHz, 512 MB RAM, Windows XP Home 081 seconds. AMD 800 Mhz Athlon 768Mb Ram Win XP Pro 085 seconds Pentium 4 1.0 Ghz ? ? 090 seconds Pentium Celeron 600 Mhz 256 Mb RAM Win 2000 Pro 095 seconds Celeron 700mhz 128 MB RAM Win XP 105 seconds AMD 1.0 Ghz Athlon 768Mb RAM Win XP Pro 106 seconds AMD 1..0 Ghz Athelon 512 MB RAM Win98SE 107 seconds AMD 1Gb Athlon, 256Mb Ram, Win 98. 108 seconds AMD ? K6 146 Mb RAM 115 seconds Pentium 3 800MHz, 128MB RAM, Win98 134 seconds Pentium III 500Mhz, 384mb RAM, Win98SE 165 seconds Pentium 3- 525Mhz 256 Mb RAM, Win 98 178 seconds Mac G3-500 Mhz 768 Mb RAM ? 215 seconds Mac G3-400 Mhz 256 Mb RAM O.S. 9.0.4, 343 seconds Mac G4 500 Mhz 832 Mb RAM O,S. 9.2.2 476 seconds iMac G3 233Mhz/ 160mb RAM OS9.2 615 seconds

"Ha! That is one way to look at it, another is sometimes real world results don't always meet are expectations!" A possability :) The thing is, we knwo that a single test case (poser) only tells us one thing - how fast poser runs on any system. In and of itself that is useful, but it is clearly tied to much more than simply CPU speed. This machine benchmarks right where it is supposed to for 3DS Max, photoshop and Premier. So P4 aware software seems to be doing exactly what it is suppose to. ::shrugs:: I'll be damned if I understand it :) Liek I said, seeing that Max can runt he same scene in < 12 seconds tells me the problem is poser... not the box itself :)

So the answer to the original post is: If you want the fastest render times in Poser, get an AMD. If you want to have 20 or 50 or 75 programs open at once and render more slowly in Poser then by all means by a P4. Don't buy just any P4 however, make sure that it is a Dell P4 that has the sticker "Intel Inside" Another thing to think about is that I also posted the P3 850 score of 81 seconds and that machine is not a Dell either. The problem may not be Poser....it may be your Dell.

I don't want to turn this into a bash anything thread, but Tom's Hardware has always said the P4s were turkeys, ;-) Intels pushing them has a lot more to do with hidden agendas than any other CPU ever sold, I think. If I was going to by a Intel system I'd go with one of the faster Celerons, AMDs are sort of a pain, too, true, for the noisy cooling fans! As to why the Macs are so slow is another story, I really think there is a problem with Posers code. I'd guess earlier versions of Poser were actually done for the Mac, and ported to the PC (some of the files have .TIFF as an extension, which is a clue!), perhaps it is done the other way now, and not very well.

Jim Burton, Glad to see you mention Tom's Hardware Guide. I did most of my research on building my computer there. As far as the noisy cooling fans go, your are absolutely right. I have 4 of them in my rig and can hear them from 3 rooms away. If I was going to recommend an Intel CPU, I would have to go with a PIII 1.0 or 1.2 ghz model. The PIII appears to have a significant performance advantage over the Celerons unless things have changed very recently. I would stay away from the P4 due to their high cost which is not justified by their performance. Tom did a nice article on his site about "Best Bang For The Buck CPUs" which I thought was very enlightening.

A developer who will go nameless here has said that Poser is traditionally coded in the CodeWarrior IDE for Mac then ported to PC. In the bid for compatibility and identical results, the code in all likelihood does not have any optimization for any hardware or OS hooks, leaving the efficiency up to the strength of your system. Judging from the hints kupa's been dropping about conforming clothes, gravity and strand-based hair, I'm guessing that Poser 5 is being optimized for both MacOS and Windows to make these features even plausible. I'm not an expert in these things, but I recall Blender's authors being very reliant on open graphics standards like OpenGL to allow them to port from Windows to PocketPC to Linux to OSX. Apparently MacOS 9.x wasn't as OpenGL-friendly. When Curious stops supporting MacOS 9 and its legacy issues and starts reaping the benefits of OSX's graphics engines, I think Mac rendering times will substantially improve. Curious' response along these lines is essentially "we'll wait and see."

"I would stay away from the P4 due to their high cost which is not justified by their performance. Tom did a nice article on his site about "Best Bang For The Buck CPUs" which I thought was very enlightening" And for most general use this is currently true, no disagreement at all :) However for code that DOES understand the P4 the upgreade is dramatic and useful for us. 3DS Max and our Mpeg encoder's are an example of this. Photoshop is starting to incorporate them as well. For what I use it for the P4 is dramatically faster than the P3... right now. I can wait the time needed for other applications to catch up and optimize for the P4... Word is plenty fast anyway. Intel is "pushing" the P4, no doubt ... but Intel is also full of really intelligent folks and while it will take time for the optimizations to become the norm they will come :) My interest in the Mac results was more that their numbers varied by much more than the processor speed. That is interesting :) Ah well, I do want to say thanks to Jim for the test, it showed me how much more profitable my time is using the Max system as my primary render tool... I had been bringing my poser scenes in only at the end of their life - now I will pull them in much earlier :)

I use Max a zillion hours a week, but it is all for modeling, I've never done a single real render in it. The only time I tried I ran into problems using my hair, I think you need to turn on double sided or something, otherwise the backside polys don't get rendered. I aught to get up to speed in it, another thing for the to-do list. However, my system is fast enough in Poser it wouldn't be primarily for saving time, but it would be nice to not have to fake the reflections like I do now. ;-) Incidently, the file is still in Freestuff, search on my name. I'd still like to get a couple more resulys, especially 1200+ Celerons or some 800 mhz+ Mac G4s. My school is updating my Mac G3 to a G4 800, but It will probably not be here to mid summer. I'm (eventually) going to add a text file with the results to the zip, in a couple years we can rerun the test and say "What did we think was so fast about these computers..." !

P4 1.5, 512mb SDRAM, using Poser 3- 44 sec.

Don't hold your breath waiting for code to be optimized for the P4. For most code it won't ever give any noticable performance gain, or is much too timeconsuming or too difficult to implement. Only in very rare cases will it give a real performance boost. It is the same story as with MMX, ISSE, ISSE2, 3Dnow! etc etc. MPEG encoding and some specific photoshop filters are indeed examples of those rare cases where you can indeed get huge performance boost. But just as with MMX and ISSE, those are only a very small part of current applications. There is no reason why suddenly the P4 optimalizations would work so much better then the P3, PPr0 or pentiumMMX optimalizations. (BTW photoshop is THE benchmarketing application. It is used to show how fantastic MMX was, how fantastic a Mac is/was, how fantastic an Athlon is or a P4. You can twist photoshop results any way you want it) I wonder how you have determined the P4 is so great for 3DsMax. In all tests I have seen the P4 performs nice in viewports, but final rendering performance is pretty sad. Also the good performance is the P4 in mpeg encoding is mainly because those programmers of Intel are much better then the programmers that made the inial code. Now that AMD programmers have helped with the codec also, the Athlon is once again (a little bit) faster than the P4. So there goes another myth about the P4. A few things to consider when reading Jim's results: Don't look at memory above 256MB. It is not used, so it doesn't influence the benchmark results. (different in more complex scenes of course. So memory is still important for Poser) CPU usage is not 100% during rendering. On my machine I only got 100% cpu usage during the first 6 seconds when the shadow map was created. Something else is the bottleneck here. I suspect it having to do with the temp file that is created, but I don't have definite proof of that. There might also be more issues like turning the dancing man off. It would be interesting to get to know more about the systems that somehow perform better or worse than similar systems. For example: the 24 seconds of the 2000+ systems is so much faster that it is not just caused by the CPU. 68 seconds for a 1800+ is so bad that something else must be holding it back. In general P4 systems seem to perform badly compared to Athlon and P3 systems. But that doesn't mean the CPU performs slow. Since the CPU usage isn't used 100% during rendering anyway other factors as RDRAM instead of DDR RAM, other IDE controllers, and such on the P4 systems have to be looked at also as a possible cause. And maybe Poser REALLY likes a powerful FPU. That will stay the weak spot of the P4.

To recap what he's saying above: the redesign of the P3 into the P4 involved removing some fairly basic math instruction subprocessors and emulating them with less efficient processors, so that those processes would now take more time to execute. Since most of the compilers out there for x86 were built around optimization based on the existence of the subprocessors, the resulting compiled code isn't as efficient as it's supposed to be. The Tom's Hardware article I'm paraphrasing went on to say that the benefits of the PPC RISC architecture have been hamstrung by the overhead which is why they're not as fast as they could be compared to the x86/Pentium CISC legacy.

It's not just that the compiled code isn't as efficient as it's supposed to be. It is also quite simply that the P4 has a weak FPU, regardless of the code. Now, if the P4 is the only CPU your code works on, that doesn't have to be that big of a problem. Instead of using the FPU you can often use ISSE2 instructions. But that poses programmers with 2 major problems: 1) You have to manually optimize your program for the P4 instructions and you can't do it in a high level language. That means a lot of extra time, money, expertise is needed for something which was and is not needed for all other processors. 2) You have to make a program that uses different code for the P4 and other x86 processors. That means more time and money is needed. It also means that the program becomes more complex, more difficult to maintain and will have more bugs. Lots of companies don't even want to write for multiple operating systems. (Win32 and MacOS) let alone, that they want to write for multiple CPUs. Whereever possible they will write one piece of code in a high level language and will let the compiler make a Win32 and a Mac version. If a compiler is able to make some optimalizations all by itself that is fine. (But again: that is not enough for the P4)

Wow... I posted a long reply before but it looks like it got eaten. I'll recap it in shorter form :)

Basically you are incorrect from the information I have on both points. There are numerous sources that indicate that the primary requirement to benefit from the P4 is to recompile your code with a compiler that knows how to do it. In fact the folks at Discreet did exactly that to get the performance version of Max and saw a 5-30% increase off the bat.

Their results indicate that there has been NO performance decrease under other processors as a result of this change.

That about covers it. Recompile with an optimizing compiler. Doesn't seem like a big problem, and there is a version of the compiler for Linux that shows similar speed increases.

So, to recap for my points:

• All the software I use that needs the boost is already optimized, and those optimizations are part of the primary branch and will continue to be optimized in future releases. This leaves Poser as the only exception... but I can't imagine that Poser 5 will not when it is trivial to do so.
• The 3D display library (DirectX)  most used by the games we develop and play here all benefit from the P4 optimizations . Quake for instance is dramatically faster on the P4. Serious Sam is not, but that's due mostly to it's rather "old school" rendering engine.
• The application software we are developing for clients is all under .NET on both the server and client side. This applications that can benefit do so automatically.

I have seen nothing that indicates that this is a nightmare of hand optimization in assembly. In fact all the information I have seen indicates that it is a simple compiler flag. Interestingly, not only is Max faster with the optimization, but more accurate (the internal format used now is 80 bits).

Personally, I am not concerned about the Athlons... I want everyone to be fast :) It's fine by me. But the P4 is not a bad chip and it has some advantages. Like most things in the tech world when teams of smart people attack a problem there are trade offs. For me, the P4 fits my uses better :)

I'm sorry, but that bit of marketing on the website doesn't support your claims: They didn't just recompile with an Intel compiler. They worked together with Intel personnell to change the DLLs. (If recompiling for P4 optimizations is such a trivial task, why did they need to work together with Intel to do it?) Indeed, they just recompiled some DLLs, but they MODIFIED key DLLs so that they now make use of SSE. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to understand that that is where most performance gain comes from. BTW 5 to 30% performance increase isn't even all that much. Simply using a better compiler can already give you 10%. (not speaking about P4 optimizations here) And Intel has very talented programmers that have realised such performance gains just by optimizing code without making use any specific P4 or SSE parts. Also I wonder how much the P3 and Athlon XP benefit from that package. Because the modification to the DLLs involved SSE, which is usefull for P4, but also for P3 and Athlon XP which have exactly the same SSE functions. Although the pack is marketed as a P4 pack, the text clearly indicates that is was made to improve both P3 and P4. Now your other points: - Those programs you have that have some sort of optimization (that's actually noticable, and not just marketing) are very likely all much more expensive than Poser4 or Poser5. For Lightwave, Cinema4D, or 3DsMax it is much easier to hire Intel for some help, and they probably have more experienced coders to start with anyway. For relatively low-cost programs like Poser the situation is quite different. - Quake3 is a very interesting case. The GAME is very much optimised for the P4. (Again with help from Intel programmers). The performance of the P4 with the game is stellar. But the ENGINE apparantly doesn't have that much optimizations. Because in all other games that use the Quake3 engine, the P4 doesn't perform nearly as well as with the quake3 game. In fact in most of those games it loses to the Athlons. - .NET has very little to do with CPU optimizations at all. Don't get me wrong. The P4 isn't a bad cpu, but it is mainly developed from a marketing standpoint (people are easily fooled by high Mhz numbers) and it simply isn't better than the competition and on top of that is more expensive then the competition. I don't see any advantages on it's design. It can shine in niche products where SSE2 can be used to effectively. But support in programs is rare, and by the time lots of programs use it, the competition has SSE2 too. (That's not new. It happened with MMX and SSE too) In cases where it can't profit from SSE2 is is often slower then the competition. I buy a CPU for the programs I use NOW and not for future optimizations. Right NOW programs use SSE optimizations at best. Next year there might be lots of programs that use SSE2, but by that time I will want to buy a new CPU anyway. The competition has SSE2 support then too. Right NOW for Poser4 the P4 is clearly not the best choice. Whether you care about that is another question. Especially since other factors are clearly very important to Poser4 performance too. We'll see what happens when Poser5 finally arrives. (if the P4 is still used by that time ;-))

Hmmm... OK :)

"I'm sorry, but that bit of marketing on the website doesn't support your claims:
They didn't just recompile with an Intel compiler. They worked together with Intel personnell to change the DLLs. (If recompiling for P4 optimizations is such a trivial task, why did they need to work together with Intel to do it?)"

I don't see anything on there that indicates hand optimization - nor do I find any references on the 'net to hand optimization being necessary for P4 optimization. I would be happy to look over any references you might have to that being a requirement for significant gains.

"BTW 5 to 30% performance increase isn't even all that much. Simply using a better compiler can already give you 10%."

I'll take it, thanks :)

"And Intel has very talented programmers that have realised such performance gains just by optimizing code without making use any specific P4 or SSE parts."

Intel just plain has some talented people. That is why I am always amazed when folks assume those same talented folks are being purely driven by their marketing department into making silly choices :)

"Those programs you have that have some sort of optimization (that's actually noticable, and not just marketing) are very likely all much more expensive than Poser4 or Poser5."

Well, yeah. That was sort of my point. For the higher end uses that we put these systems too the P4 is a good choice for us... the chip is fast and the quality is good, it comes from vendors we like and the optimizations exist is all the software we use that it would matter in.

BTW - that is not the only circumstance for the gains. There has been a bit of stir in the Linux community because some projects are advocating the use of the Intel compiler over the GNU compiler set because of it's superior performance ... especially on P4 chips.

The P4 is a chip with a LONG pipeline and some interesting instruction choices - it needs to be paired with a compiler that knows what to do to make it hum along - fortunately Intel has built one.

"For relatively low-cost programs like Poser the situation is quite different."

The stuff I see on the net and the experiences of a number of developers say something else. That significant performance gains are possible simply with a  recompile.

"Quake3 is a very interesting case. The GAME is very much optimised for the P4. (Again with help from Intel programmers). The performance of the P4 with the game is stellar. But the ENGINE apparantly doesn't have that much optimizations. Because in all other games that use the Quake3 engine, the P4 doesn't perform nearly as well as with the quake3 game. In fact in most of those games it loses to the Athlons."

Yup, it is interesting :) Especially because Quake 3 is completely bound by it's rendering engine for performance. There is no AI to speak of and almost no housekeeping done. The performance is totally tied to the graphics engine. The fact that it performs so well under the P4 is a useful pointer to what is possible with that chip and a smart development team.

The fact that those folks who license the engine manage to sacrifice that advantage speaks of them more than the chip :)

".NET has very little to do with CPU optimizations at all."

Actually, this is not entirely the case. >NET software (we are developing a number of programs under it) makes heavy use of the runtime environment and libraries provided by MS. Since those are P4 aware and optimized the software that sits on them is also optimized that way. This would be true for a Athlon optimized version if one existed.

As more software is developed on this framework, more software will see the benefits. Simple :)

"I buy a CPU for the programs I use NOW and not for future optimizations."

So do I :) And the programs we use most often are P4 aware. The performance is on par  or faster than the Athlon parts and the systems come from vendors we trust (a whole other discussion). As there is (for us) no disadvantage to running the P4 we are happy to do so.

As for the future, we keep systems in service for years... I see no reason not to bet on the industry leader and take the advantages as the come later, in addition to the ones we get now :)

"Right NOW for Poser4 the P4 is clearly not the best choice."

While I can agree that there seems to be a slight advantage to the Athlon XP at a similar clock speed for Poser, the benchmark also (as you mentioned) shows that Poser is extremely sensitive to other issues - the wide disparity in performance across machines of similar CPU is a critical clue.

Long before I would worry about my brand of CPU for Poser I would worry about the other factors that seem to be so important to it.

"We'll see what happens when Poser5 finally arrives."

Given the dramatic change sin the rendering system and soft body dynamics that have been hinted at, I think we can see that Poser 5 will have to be a more gown up piece of software. They will no longer be able to ignore the hardware acceleration available for previews and they will be using good compilers for the system.

Me, I would LOVE to see Poser 4 compiled with the Intel compiler... just to see what happens :)

 

I'll try to make my reply short time time :-) "I don't see anything on there that indicates hand optimization - nor do I find any references on the 'net to hand optimization being necessary for P4 optimization. I would be happy to look over any references you might have to that being a requirement for significant gains." The webpage you refered to has the proof: "In addition to being recompiled with the Intel compiler, the following DLLs have had key performance functions optimized using SSE (Streaming SIMD Extensions). Pentium III class processors and higher will be able to take advantage of these optimizations. Rend.dlr Blur.dlv" I think you'll agree that the rend.dlr would be the most likely candidate if you want to modify a DLL to improve performance. I wouldn't even be suprised if you could gain up to 30% from just those 2 DLLs, and not even touch the rest. "Intel just plain has some talented people. That is why I am always amazed when folks assume those same talented folks are being purely driven by their marketing department into making silly choices :)" I never said it was a silly choice. It has been a very smart move by Intel and AMD still has a lot of problems trying to inform people that Mhz alone doesn't say anything about performance. It would have been a silly choice if the impact of that design decision had been so large that they would not have been able to keep up with AMD. Right now the situation is that both have equally powerfull CPUs. But also remember that those talented folks still want to be paid. And that sometimes means that you have to accept what management decides and try to make the best of it. Lastly I'll counter your story about .NET with past experience with DirectX. DirectX got optimized for ISSE and later for 3DNow! Did we ever notice anything? Did you ever notice that the ATI and Nvidia drivers got optimized for them? No! Those generic optimizations will hardly ever really give big performance gains. You need to make optimizations specifically for your application to really get performance gains. That is what is proven time and again. Take a look at Quake. Only when game developers get help from Intel (or AMD) are really big performance gains realized. Without help from Intel they can't accomplish it. The same here with the special performance pack for Max. BTW most performance gains I have seen for CPUs have been geared towards the use of SSE and SSE2 (or 3Dnow!) With the mpeg in windows media player being the best example. P4 did very well in those benchmarks, and people thought that was because of the P4 architecture. Later it was discovered that media player didn't activate the SSE optimizations in the AthlonXP CPU. The moment those were activated the Athlon got just as much performance gain as the P4 and the Athlon beat the P4 again in that department. That's why I am also interested in the performance gain with that pack when used with the P3 and the AthlonXP. Since the most important modifications seem to be geared towards SSE and not just P4. Hmm, it seems I didn't manage to make a short reply after all.... ;-) One last remark. I don't agree with you that there is such a wide disparity in performance across machines of similar CPU. Most systems perform as expected and are grouped in clusters. I see only a few exceptions: - XP 1800+ 68 seconds. As I said before I really wonder what is holding that system back. - Dual 1700+ Not really an exception since a dual config gives overhead, and AGP implementation on dual systems is not that good. - the 1Ghz Athlon systems seem out of place. Maybe they are SlotA athlons instead of Thunderbirds? But differences in having that dancing man activated or not should also be considered. BTW I would also love to see Poser4 compiled with the Intel compiler. But I would like to see two compilations. One with P4 optimizations turned on, and one with normal settings but also with the Intel compiler. Just to see the difference between the Intel compiler and another compiler, and the difference between different settings within the compiler. I remember IBM made the Windows3.1 within OS/2 10% faster by just taking the source code from Microsoft and compiling it with their own compiler. They didn't modify any file for that and it didn't use any CPU specific settings either.

Is there some rule that prevents long replies from being posted 9 times out of 10.....? Took me quite a lot of tries to post the above....

BTW - thanks for the discussion - it's nice to be able to discuss these things without it turning into zealotry and anger :)

"The webpage you refered to has the proof:"

Optimized in the source code, in a HLL is not the same thing as the claimed requirement to hand optimize the assembly. Surely you Can agree to that?

"It has been a very smart move by Intel and AMD still has a lot of problems trying to inform people that Mhz alone doesn't say anything about performance."

I disagree the the interest was purely clock speed. I think the reality is that Intel sees some benefits to the long pipeline architecture. Those benefits mean that the P4 performs as well as it's competition (though it is more expensive, the Intel parts usually are... people will pay for the higher quality of the brand) and they mean that the chip has a long improvable life in the architecture.

The P4 is an evolutionary, not revolutionary chip - but it does well and certainly is no slouch :)

"DirectX got optimized for ISSE and later for 3DNow! Did we ever notice anything?"

I certainly notice when DirectX got the optimizations for the processors of the time, MMX was it? SSE? Whatever :) And I notice now when I have to compress things. So these optimizations DO matter. SSE2 is a good thing... a very good thing. Yeah, AMD will be able to copy it, they have before, but I don't mind supporting the folks who are doing the job of getting it supported.

"That's why I am also interested in the performance gain with that pack when used with the P3 and the AthlonXP. Since the most important modifications seem to be geared towards SSE and not just P4."

I'd be happy to see it as well, since at the moment the Atlon's don't support SSE2 as I recall. If the optimizations use that then there should be a dramatic difference. I am all for seeing how this all turns out :)

I looked and looked out there, and I couldn't find a benchmark that had the P4 and the Athlon XP both with and without the performance update under Max as the benchmark. Very disappointing.

I would REALLY like to know what else Poser is dependant on :(

Anyway, thanks again!

OH, for long posts? I have noticed that Renderosity threads "time out". If I read a thread then take a while to compose a reply, it is best to "refresh" the thread page before I actually enter the reply. So I compose it in another editor. When I do that it almost always actually posts.

Much to my displeasure I learned this morning that Apple's 9.0 installer refuses to install the AltiVec extensions if it detects an off-brand G4 update (like my newertech MAXpowr G4). Fortunately I also learned that Apple's own Tome Viewer is a can opener for their installers and bypasses this nonsense, extracting the four necessary extensions. However, the improvement in rendering time is not colossal: 468 seconds instead of 476, or 1.7% faster. I'd like to go back and create some extension sets that eliminate most of the stuff Poser isn't using and report again.

Poser requires Apple's OpenTransport library (presumably for the direct link to Curious), so disabling the internet components is not an option. After experimenting with disabling other system components, results were poor: 473 seconds. My guess is that Poser's mathematical operations don't call on the AltiVec hardware much. Of course, my machine is hardly typical: it's a souped up 7500, so USB support is software, and Poser is residing on an external drive because the Mac's still sporting the 1.5G SCSI internal it came with.

"Optimized in the source code, in a HLL is not the same thing as the claimed requirement to hand optimize the assembly. Surely you Can agree to that?" I'll grant you that it doesn't mean you have to optimize with assembler. But a compiler won't change source code. So any optimization in that source code has had to be done by a software engineer and therefore counts as hand optimized to me. Indeed AthlonXP doesn't yet support SSE2. (Next generation CPU will) But although the performance pack is called a P4 pack, the explanation about it only talks about SSE and talks about improving the P4 AND P3. If the modifications to the source code had been for SSE2 and would just have benefitted the P4, I'm convinced they would have mentioned SSE2 instead of just SSE. About the bottlenecks for Poser4. As you have also seen, the memory doesn't make much difference in this benchmark. You just have to have 256MB to make sure performance isn't degraded because of swapping. But if you have 1GB or 256MB doesn't matter at all in this test. When I render I see that during creation of the shadowmaps the CPU is at 100%. Shadowmaps aren't big here so that is just 6s of my 35s rendertime. After that my CPU usage is about 70% and I hear the harddisk. I assumed Poser writes the rendered image to a temporary file. I thought that may be the bottleneck. But I have done the test with performance monitor running and I don't see any bottlenecks at all. Pages/sec is low: 1.6 , so is avg disk write queue: 0.397 max Disk write Bytes/sec doesn't exceed 400Kb/s. So it's not the disk that is holding things back. It's not the CPU nor the amount of memory. What's left? I think there are more things like the dancing man holding things back. I didn't have him disabled this time, and I couldn't see that in the performance counters. There are probably more things like that, that slow it down without us being able to point to a specific bottleneck.

"Indeed AthlonXP doesn't yet support SSE2. (Next generation CPU will) But although the performance pack is called a P4 pack, the explanation about it only talks about SSE and talks about improving the P4 AND P3." I guess until we get some comparative benchmarks we are at a stand still on this - guessing about code we can't see :) "So it's not the disk that is holding things back. It's not the CPU nor the amount of memory. What's left?" A good question! I am curious why a scene with 2 mil figures (Vick and Steph) and complex hair with a UD light setup renders faster (MUCH faster) than that benchmark did. Maybe a second benchmark file is needed to compare another data point?

That was probably a scene rendered in a different program? In that case there are soo many variables to take into account that's impossible to judge if the other program has a more efficient renderer, or that it maybe renders less, or the light setup was easier etc etc. Light can make a LOT of difference. Still performance can differ a lot between programs. The raytracers of Bryce and Vue seem extremely slow compared to Cinema4D. (Haven't done much with it, just a bit of playing around. Having lots of problems with transmaps in san francisco hair. Maybe that's why it is faster too. Who knows? :-)) You could try a second benchmark for Poser with hi-res Vicky and hi-res shadowmaps, although I don't expect much difference. I think you would mainly see much higher memory demands, but as long as you have enough memory not much difference relatively from the current list. If you make a Poser scene and put it in free stuff I guess we'll find enough people to give it another try. And this time we'll have to make sure that everybody has the dancing man turned off :-)

"If you make a Poser scene and put it in free stuff I guess we'll find enough people to give it another try. And this time we'll have to make sure that everybody has the dancing man turned off :-)" Actually it was Poser... maybe it is the light setup. I'll see if I can find time to set up a test file sometime soon.

Gee, I like the dancing man! I'd suggest a few less characters though, I think the one I put up was bigger than most people work most of the time. I was also suprized to see my hard drive light come on (after I hooked it up!), with 768 Mb RAM I thought it would run in memory, but maybe Poser always has to open all the files.

I guess that the dancing man won't make much difference for larger renders, just for the short ones. 5 seconds is a lot of total render time is 44 seconds, but nobody will care about 5 seconds on a total of 440. I saw the harddisk light although I have 1GB, but that is not caused by swapping or anything like that. During rendering Poser writes the image to a temporary file on the harddisk and that is what you see. (In a performance log you will see that the harddisk activity is just writing) You could try one or more vicky figures with high res textures and large shadowmaps. It would focus the benchmark more on textures and less on polygones. I wouldn't use stephanie or mike since a lot of people won't have those figures. A lot of people do have vicky though. (which texture to use might be a problem. Is there a high res texture from free stuff?)

Is there any way to alter the patrh of the temporary file? I am tempted to point it at a ramdisk and see if that helps :)

I've been thinking along those lines too :-) I think Poser just uses the %temp variable. I don't know how to point that to a ramdisk in w2k/xp. Then again, the disk write queue en bytes/sec I measured are not high at all, so I wonder how much it would help anyway.

News from Curious Labs on the question :) --------------------------------------- From: "Curious Labs Technical Support" To: Cc: "TECH SUPPORT CURIOUS LABS" Sent: Monday, April 08, 2002 2:14 AM Subject: Re: Why does Poser Rende... Poser 4 was released before computers with your specifications existed. We are constantly striving to improve our products. We cannot announce any updates or other developments in advance of press releases. Please visit our Web site at www.curiouslabs.com for the latest information about our products. > > Why does Poser Render soooo slowly on a Pentium 4?? > > > > A Pentium 4 has 6!!!! Floating point units and an Athlon only has 2!!!. If software is compiled properly a P4 will!! eat anything in its path. > > > > Why isnt it written to handle a Pentiium 4s floating point system and > handle Rambus memory????? > > > > I have notice up to a 60 second difference between an Athlon and a P4 on render. > > > > Is there an Update to make it perform faster on a P4?? > > > > > > Thanks, > >

There is some misinformation in the mail to which Curious Labs has responded. I'll try to claify in normal english. The techies should take a look at http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/00q4/001120/p4-10.html which tells you the same, but with a more indepth and complex explanation. First: The P4 does NOT have 6 floating point units. How someone got to this number I can't imagine, but it is just not true! That person probably confused FPUs with execution units, but even then the number 6 is wrong. (just as the 2 for Athlon) Some background: The design goal for the P4 was a chip that had to run at as high clock speed as possible. (no matter what)Furthermore it would feature another extension to SSE to improve performance. The result was that some compromises had to be made which have produced a CPU that acts quite differently (and for some people unpredictable) than its predecessors. One of the compromises is that SSE2 has been introduced, but at the expense of FPU, MMX, and SSE1. And those are less powerfull then on the P3 and Athlon. That isn't a bad thing as long as everybody rewrites their programs and changes the X87FPU instructions into SSE2 instructions. (And as long as they don't mind that their precision goes down from 80bit to 64bit floating point) The result shows very clearly in the benchmarks. In programs which are specially optimized to use SSE2 instructions, the P4 shines, but in code that uses X87 FPU instructions the P4 does poorly compared to P3 and Athlon, because it was designed that way. Poser4 was of course made for X87 FPU instructions. Lots of companies find that changing software to let it make use of SSE2 is difficult, time consuming and thus costly. Therefore you can see that it is only done in very expensive software where reasonably big performance gains can be reached. (Lightwave, 3dsMax etc) The question is whether that is affordable for a small company like Curious Labs, which creates a low priced program: Poser5. Time will tell. (or maybe curious labs) Marc. P.S. For people that don't want to read the entire article I mentioned (or are put off by the technical terms) I've quoted some parts specifically about the FPU performance: "Things look worse if you have a look at the red boxes, which represent the FPU-part of Pentium 4. Please take the time and compare this part to the Pentium III block diagram. You will see that Intel has actually castrated quite a bit of the SSE/MMX part of Pentium 4. Pentium III used to have two MMX and two SSE units, but Pentium 4 has only got one of each. Intel claims that additional units would not have improved the SSE/SSE2, MMX or FPU performance. However, our benchmark results speak a different language." "Intel hopes that software developers will soon replace the old x87-FPU-instructions with the double-precision FP instructions of SSE2, so that Intel's currently false claim that Pentium 4 has the most powerful FPU finally becomes reality. AMD is very impressed with SSE2 as well, which is why it announced to us only a few days ago that the upcoming Hammer-line of x86-64 processors will include SSE2 as well. I personally have my doubts if SSE2 will be able to replace x87-instructions in scientific software. We should not forget that the original FPU is using 80-bit FP-values, not the less exact 64-bit FP-values offered by SSE2."

Flash forward nearly two years -- a dual 1.8GHz G5 running P4 under 9.2 in Classic mode renders the scene in 92.97 seconds.