My brand new computer is having problems with Poser 5. Whenever I try to do a Firefly render (draft or production mode), the durn thang reboots! It renders OK in the Poser 4 renderer, but I wanna use Firefly. I have Poser 5 with the latest patches. Mu computer has an Athlon 2.4 gig CPU, 512 megs of DDR, and a Radeon-based video card with 128 megs of DDR. Has anybody seen behavior like this before? Thanks in advance for any assistance. Guy Hoyle

Other info: sometimes I can do a Firefly render if there's just one character in the scene, maybe with some clothing, but adding more than that seems to trigger the effect.

Similar problems have been reported with laptops resulting in reboots when the processor begins to get too hot. Firefly renders are reportedly particularly suceptable to this. It maybe worth looking at the cooling setup, or any system utilities that will report the processor temperature. Bill

Hmm, I have three fans on my computer: one on the processor, one on the motherboard, and one on the side of the case; I would think that would be enough, but I'll check out any alternatives. I'll also get something to report the CPU temperature. Thanks! Guy

Spontaneous reboots sound like a hardware or driver problem to me. I know that XP reboots automatically on driver failures. What operating system are you using? It could also be faulty RAM. Do you have any other memory-intense applications? Do you experience automatic reboots when using any other applications? It doesn't sound like it's Poser's fault, an application should not be able to reboot the computer, no matter what goes wrong. I suppose there's rather something wrong with the drivers or hardware, maybe an IRQ conflict or DMA problems. What you should try is turning off graphics acceleration and see if the problem still occurs.

I'm using Win2k Pro. I tried turning off the graphics acceleration, but still had the problem. This morning I looked for and found a driver update, and the problem has now changed: when I try to render, the computer freezes up. It still needs to be rebooted, but it doesn't happen automatically. (An "improvement", I suppose!) Still looking for a solution, but thatnks for the input! Guy

That really sounds like a driver/video card problem. You might want to try consulting a PC-Hardware related forum, maybe you're not the only one having problems with that card? It's not unusual for new video cards that their drivers are not as stable as they should be. What other hardware, especially PCI cards do you have in your computer? Does your motherboard have integrated video? The usual procedure for finding the source of hardware problems would be removing all expansion cards from your system, and if the error doesn't occur then putting them back in one by one until you find the combination that crashes your system. However, as you write that this happens especially with larger scenes. Did you try rendering very basic scenes like just a ball prop or similar? It still could be faulty RAM, if you have two sticks of RAM in your computer try running your system with only one of them and see if it still crashes.

Actually, with simple scenes it seems to do OK. Hardware: an ATI Radeon 9000 video card (AGP) with 128 megs of DDR ram; 512 megs of DDR on the motherboard; onboard audio and ethernet; no onboard video. Also found out when I was checking the BIOS earlier that the setting for the video card was originally defaulted to PCI instead of AGP, so I changed that. Guy

BTW, there's only one stick of RAM, 512 megs.

I suspect it isn't a video card problem, as has already been stated Poser doesn't use anything but the standard GDI functions and rendering functionality is a process that is dependent almost entirely on processor/memory usage. However, Stefan may well be correct about the memory problem. Even if there is only one stick, it's quite possible that there are faults at some of the higher (absolute) memory adresses, which you just don't see in normal use. Memeory testers should be fairly easy to come by. Bill

I am having the same problem. Win2k Pro 1 GB DDR RAM 3 HDDs 20 GB 20 GB 40 GB Pentium 4 1.6 GHz 3.8 GB swap file.

I haven't found a solution, except to avoid Firefly in all but the simplest renders. My memory checks out OK. Guy

What type of Motherboard are you using? This could be very important information.

Tyan 510

I am not sure about your board being one of the problem boards, but I know that Via chipsets and ATI AGP radeon cards with AMD processors don't get along very well. This is not the case with all motherboards but many have the problem. Asus boards are famous for it. This may be something you may want to investigate a litte. I ran into that problem using maya with my ATI card. I no longer have the problem because I am now using an NVidia based card. This may help you in your search for a solution.

hmmm, I used to have an NVidia card, a GForce 2 IIRC, before I got the Radeon, and the same thing happened; that's one reason I got the Radeon. (What kind of NVidia do you have, though?) Guy

I have an Nvidia GeForce 4 440se that thinks its a quadro. If you had the same problem then that says right there that it is not a vid card problem. Could be ram or even something in the bios set incorrectly for your ram or even your video card.

Trying moving swap file to third drive. Was spread over two disks.

For those who might still care, I seem to have solved this problem. Instead of 512 megs of PC2100 RAM, I just changed it out for 2x512 megs of PC2100 RAM. Theoretically the PC2700 should have been OK, so I don't know if the solution was the PC2100 or the extra 512 megs, but at least the problem has gone away.