Revert from SP3a to SP3. How?

[Tim in Hollywood]

What is the process of reverting to SP3 from SP3a?

My new Nehalem dual quad-core Windows XP x64 system is using only 1 of 8 cores when going through the prepass stage and Light Cache stage. This makes it much slower than my old system purchased in 2004 (even then, it wasn't top of the line).

I posted about this in a portion of my "last bucket hangs" thread, but it received no response.

Since I really must get this working, I'm interested in trying SP3 (which was installed on my old computer).

[vlado]

Reverting to SP3 will likely not change anything, as there are no changes related to that code.

Things you can try:
(*) Make sure that Multithreading option in the Preferences of 3ds Max is turned on;
(*) Make sure that the light cache passes are set to 8;
(*) Make sure you didn't explicity limit the number of threads from MaxScript; to do this, open the MaxScript listener (F11) and type:

renderers.current.system_numThreads=0

Best regards,
Vlado

[vlado]

Also another thing: if you have lots of displacement, proxies or VRayFur objects, the slowdown might be because of low "Dynamic memory limit" option - in that case, increasing the value should help.

Best regards,
Vlado

[werticus]

i have found that the dynamic memory limit in xp is best set to 2gb under your total memory... if that helps at all.