Quote -
I never thought to bring it up, but I've been doing that with Poser and other apps for a while now, although my Q9550 quad core doesn't have a problem running my browser or email while Poser is at normal priority, and nothing seems to make it really use the CPU at 100% through the entire render. It seems it always drops down to 50% then 25% halfway through.

Hi Mike!
The multi-core support before Poser 8 was not optimal. With 4 cores, it assigned one quadrant to each core. If one quadrant was done, that core went idle and did not help out with the other quadrants.

Poser 8 does it differently. Each core is only given a bucket, not a quadrant. When it finishes, it starts the next un-rendered bucket. So you'll only drop to below 100% when there are less than 4 buckets left to work on.

Poser 8 will use up to 32 cores, far more than the previous limit of 4.

When we get to 256 or 1024 cores, even the new strategy will be inadequate, as the number of cores active cannot exceed the number of buckets left. I wonder what they'll do then?

---

Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)