Just wondering if anyone have tested Poser 5 on 64 bits CPU. Is it better? any improvement? Waldo

Well right now I think only the big servers have them.(Itanium2 is for servers) Microsoft has yet to put out a 64 bit Operating system, Mac is on it's way to the home computer.(So they say) Intel hasn't made a 64 bit chip yet for the home computer. (that they'll admit to) Poser 5 is a 32 bit program. So it will not make use of it anyway. Haven't a clue! ;)

Not related to Poser: The Athlon64's are being released next month and the Opterons are already out. MS is releasing a patch for XP pro in the fall. They were giving away a beta version at siggraph for the Opterons.

"Desktop and mobile PCs built on the AMD Athlon 64 processor will be able to run 64-bit applications at full performance and simultaneously run 32-bit software applications with no performance penalty." Press released by AMD I wonders what they mean with no performance penalty? I would like to review 32bits perofformance in Athlon64. If you have the link please post it here. Waldo

"Mac is on it's way to the home computer.(So they say)" The 64bit G5 Powermac is already available.

G5s aren't shipping 'til the end of the month IIRC.

I reviewed G5's specifications. It sounds good but the RAM limitation is serious, it only expanable to 4GB. My computer hit 2GB several times with poser and 40+ hairs. Firefly tripled the original scene size before render and it pissed on my hard driver for vitural memory space. So I have been considering for awhile to buy either Itanium2 or Opteron with full RAM (16GB desktop mainboard) because I can not afford to have other RAM crash. I have all XFrog plants/trees cd library ($3500.00). Some of plants/trees in it has high polygons. I must have a computer with large RAM. Some of you probably will suggest me to seek supercomputer desktop from SGI. I have evaluated SGI machines and high-end softwares. I do not like it a bit because learning curves and require to hire 3D artists to complete a scene. I like simple 3d proggies Carrara, VUE, and Poser. Its easy to work with and it is attractive softwares. I hope that CL will introduce Carrara's rendering engine into Poser's core program. I am continuing to support CL as long as if they hears us. Waldo

eight gigs on the high end model

Unfortunately, Poser's only a 32 bit application on both the MAC and the PC, so regardless of what memory you have installed on a 64 bit machine, P5 will only ever be able to utilise a maximum of 2GB data space. Basically, once its assigned half of its memory range to the program image and OS interfaces and other system stuff, that's the total range of addresses is capable of represnting in a 32 bit word. Even if it were to survive for another release I suspect it would probably still be several years before we actually saw a version that was capable of running in as a native 64 bit application, and therefore being able to exceed the 2GB barrier. I've gone into this a lot in the past, but the upshot was that P5 was pretty much obselete when it released, there were already plenty of signs that P4 users were getting close to the maximum capability of the (32 bit) software, and it was no stretch to see that the next generation of DAZ figure were going to push things even further (ergo morph injection, a kind of manual disk buffering). Not to mention all the new functionality which squeezed the envelope even further. Not that any of that really matters, since, with a better design, Poser could probably effortlessly running at less than 100MB so far as anything that people are actually managing to do with it. There is incredible inefficiency, literally 90-95% or more of the memory use is wholly unnecessary. Maybe, Poser 6, if there is one, or maybe DAZ|Studio will give us an application actually raises users expectations off the floor. Bill

Attached Link: http://www.hardwaremania.com/reviews_eng/asussk8n/sk8n-1.shtml

Here's a link to a review of some 32 bit results with Opteron. They're using an Nvidia motherboard uilt to take a single Opteron. By the time a 64 bit version of Windows is available, the Athlon 64 should be out and it would probably be a better chip for the average desktop application. For Poser, the best performance may be in the 32 bit mode (64 bit OS/32 bit application). From what I've read, in this mode, even though the application is 32 bit, the OS handles all memory aperations at 64 bits, thus improving performance for memory intensive applications. If that's the case, DAZ Studio may be the first opportunity since it's supposed to run on Linux and there is at least one 64 bit Linux version available now. I'd also expect there's a better chance of DAZ coming up with a 64 bit version of Studio long before we'll ever see a 64 bit version of Poser. At any rate, I'd wait a while before investing. Wait and see how the Athlon 64 is going to compare to the Opteron and there are a few motherboards to choose from, unless you have the bucks to burn and you absolutely have to have the fastest thing available. One thing that would bother me though is the seemingly random Poser 5 glitches on current systems and then trying to run it on something entirely new...

the OS handles all memory aperations at 64 bits, thus improving performance for memory intensive applications. Unfortunately, the memory limit is neverthess compiled into the code of 32 bit applications, and regardless of the underlying OS memory operations, the numbers embedded in the data just basically can't refer to addresses with ranges greater than 2Gb. The next generation always will always, of course be faster and have a better performance for a number of reasons, and quite likely, with a "real" 64 bit bus architecture, data movement will be substantially faster, and page faults reduced, but the 2GB limit won't go away. Its unlikely that any real performance comparisons will directly be relevant to Poser, though. For the vast majority of applications, including those that likely comprise the benchmarks, 2GB is considered to be more than enough memory that any developer needs to implement anything. Even compared with "heavyweight" applications, Poser's memory usage is astronomical. As I've said, DAZ|Studio doen't need to 64bit to achieve greatly more capacity than Poser, all it needs is for the developers to be aware of resource usage and make sensible choices. Interestingly, since DAZ have already sussed out that they needed disk buffering, aka. Morph Injection, to make V3 practical, I suspect that there's a great likelihood that they will be (trivially) automating this in Studio, which by itself will reduce the memory use for figure by a significant factor. Beyond this, if they handle the RSI material capabilities of the 3-Delight renderer according to the book (again with disk storage) the memory requirements for texture maps will effectively disappear. And of course, a Reyes renderer architecture (ignoring Firefly as a bad example) technically only needs one polygon, one pixel and a render bucket stored in memory at one time. If anyone's running a tab, I'd be putting money on Studio having (effortlessly) ten times the "raw figure capacity" than P5. But will OpenGL be able to handle the load?? Bill

Attached Link: http://www.devx.com/amd/Article/16018/2907?pf=true

My understanding is that the limit is 4GB of virtual address space. You're right, compatibility mode won't raise that limit. Since the cpu is running in 64 bit mode for the OS though, the application can use the entire address space without having to share it with the kernel whil will be loaded above 4GB. You'll also gain any performance enhancements from running a 64 bit OS on 64 bit hardware. AAT least that's what I glean from the articles I've read. I'm no hardware guru by any means. Anyway, I somehow doubt that Poser would be a very simple or clean recompile to 64 bits. IBM supposedly did DB2 in a couple of days but I suspect it was much cleaner code and didn't include a raft of 3rd party add ons like the face room in P5. Of course, they could take advantage of recompiling just the core code but...nah.

"Even compared with "heavyweight" applications, Poser's memory usage is astronomical." That would explain why it has higher recommended hardware requirements than Newteks Lightwave3D and Alias Wavefront's MAYA complete :-/

I my opinion, the limitation of a 32 bit os is 4gig, but Poser can't handle that at all... Its only capable of adressing, whithin a 2 gig space. Even better, its not capable of running on a workstation whith 4 gig installed without a patch.. rofl! But! who of you guys, can really say poser needs more than 2 gig ram? I'm rendering bigger animations with maya and poser.. Poser has more ram needs, but 2 gigs should last 4 a while :/ Poser itself has a realy bad program strukture in my opinion. Its terrebly slow, it shuts down while rendering all the time! It has bugs over and over and it doesent support dual cpu prozessing at all. To get back 2 the headline! Surely poser will run faster on an opteron system, not caused by the 64 bit architekture, but by the huge ammount of the opterons L2 cache. so long..

The conceivable adress range is 4GB for a 32 bit word, but also some of the address range needs to be put aside for OS services, etc. and typically all of the major OS's simply split the address range down the middle, so that there's an upper and lower range, split at the 2GB mark, one half for services and the other half the (allocatable) data heap. So far as I am aware this applies to all Windows Mac OS's and UNIX brands. The only exception that I'm aware of was an enterprise version of NT which allowed 3GB for program data, so at least there is maybe some flexibility. At the end of the day though, OS developers really aren't interested putting in the work to allow more space for application data because there simply isn't any compelling reason as to why any program should need anything like 2GB of memory in the first place. Bill

Apparently (again, just my understanding), the 64 bit version of XP will load the kernel above 4GB when the Opteron is in compatibility or full 64 bit mode. It may well be that an application will have to be recoded to see the extra 2GB, though they don't say that. As for the advantages, large databases and data intensive scientific applications can take advantage of all the memory they can get, one reason why DB2 and MySQL are some of the first "general purpose" applications being ported to 64 bits. The more data you can keep in main memory, the better. Apparently, game makers see a plus also. Epic Games, is doing a 64 bit version of Unreal Tournament 2003 and is working on an entirely new 64 bit game as well. I guess people who don't mind spending $500 for a video card won't balk at the price of 4 GB of registered ECC RAM either.

The real question is whether CL, E-on, Corel, etc, will bother to port their apps over to X86-64. And from the available anectdotal evidence, it would be extremely worth the minimal investment in time (at least one of those database ports took one programmer a grand total of two days to port and recompile) for all of them to do so. The only thing I wish AMD had done is put the memory controller on its own slab, with either a Hypertransport interface to the CPU, or a seperate bus (whichever would prove to be faster), so that you could upgrade your mem capabilites without having to replace your processor....

In case if you didnt know that Opteron can take up to 256 TB. CL, E-on, and Carrara will take the next step into 64 bits platform when customers is abandoning 32 bits world. Waldo