Can anyone tell me if Poser rendering is any faster with a better video card? If so does anyone have any recommendations on what video card to buy?

I'd like to know about that too

The "quality" of the video card has little or nothing to do with render speeds for the current version of Poser (allegedly 4.03 uses some accelleration), but the memory on the card can affect it - a 32MB card will render a little faster than a 16MB one, for example.

sad, this is the same than I found out - I've tried an 8 MB, 16 MB, 32 MB Graphic-Card (Poser 4.0.2) with 64 MByte RAM - The improvement was minimal. Than increasing the RAM and - it renders a lot faster. If you're thinking of an imrovement for Poser - increase the RAM

Its because Poser does all its renders using the cpu in software, not on the card. All its needs from the card is some way to write and read pixels. The card is nothing more than a pixel pusher to Poser. Hopefully the newer version of Poser will have cool support (DX or OpenGL). Besides, its not like Poser is doing anything spectacular with renders. It doesn't ray trace, only smooth shaded, z-buffered, textured, perspective correct polygons with alpha, bump and reflection capability. Nothing you can't do in DX 6 or 7 today. Of course with seperate hardware your mileage may vary. Some cards may handle the stencil buffers, bump maps and reflection maps differently. Then again, going tpo DX or Opengl could open a lot of doors to new features like Light maps, much higher poly counts and so forth.

Dealing with 3D animation of anykind can be a pain if you don't have alot of RAM. Like anyother kinds of 3D program Uses Poser aswell much RAM. So inorder to make Poser Run smoother i would suggest that you upgrade your RAM couse thats the main prob when your Dealing with 3D Anyone got some money to donate to me blink //DE With just 64 MB RAM

unfortunately the bestest, fastest vid card wont speed up renders.. but faster CPU and mega memory will.. to a point... not having anything else running during the render will speed it up too.. I.E. norton systemworks, go-zilla,scanmanager etc.... the fewer apps running the faster the render... Good luck, Wizzard