So, upgraded from v9 to v10. The reason for this was the limitations of the old 32-bit v9 executable; the damned thing constantly crashed on my second project when it ran out of memory (while actually using a laughably small fraction of my total RAM); I never got a successful render, so I finally gave up and grabbed v10. The new version is 64-bit and was built for OSX 10.6 (Snow Leopard) which I'm running on the iMac -- I threw a project at it and turned up the settings and immediately it was using half of my 16GB. Score!

First impressions... Well, it's an awful lot faster than v9, especially at radiosity (holy batcrap it's fast -- at least 10x faster than v9, seems like, possibly more -- with what seems like less obvious visual artifacts to boot). Which would be great if it would at least think about using more than one core when calculating anything else -- it rendered the new version of Game just a couple minutes slower -- while using approximately 25% of the processing power. WTF. It's so much worse than v9 at CPU utilization that it's not even funny -- it probably averages a core and a half, when v9 at least averaged five out of eight (which is already pretty embarrassing for a rendering engine).

[ Crossposted from http://doubt72.dreamwidth.org/1455.html ]