i'm using AMD Athlon 1 GHz, 256MB DDRRAM, ATI9600 VGA.

how can i make it faster?

install more ram. then install some more. HD speed, motherboard bus speed, fast ram, fast CPU all will make poser run faster. if your on a budget then add a stick of 512mb ram in your box and you should see better performance. you didn't say what OS, but XP, or NT would help also more so than win98 or ME (ME is HORRIBLE).

yup. I have 2 computers that i run poser5 on. my own is a p3 1.08 Ghz,256 sdram, riva tnt2 32 mb vid card..it runs well but the one I use at the office is P4 2.2 Ghz, 512 DDR ram, 64mb nvdia geforce Vid Card.it's definitely faster. I can render images with full props, materials settings plus the option of turning on quite a few reflections settings to the max! I rendered one of my images which was larger than 800X600 and it took only less than 5 minutes at 300dpi quality firefly engine renderer.. It's definitely all about the extra ram. and you should be running it on XP pro. there's no other choice. just imagine after 4 hours of rendering and your 96% complete with your render then it happens...your system freezes...windows 98se is good but it doesnt handle memories over 128mb pretty well. you could install apps that will help but still youre using system resources with another background app working while rendering.

What the others said - get more RAM and make sure you're on 2k or XP. Adding another 512MB RAM will definately make a difference in rendering speed and is also likely to improve overall performance, especially when using hi-poly figures.

I used to run poser4 on a pentium1 200Mhz with 64Mb Ram & win98 it plodded along, then I bought a nice Pentium 4 2Ghz with 1Gb ram with WinXP home & Whooooooooosh it flies along hehehehe.

Is it important to upgrade VGA card ???

No, VGA card has no significance at all for Poser since it doesn't have 3D graphics support. Important: Fast CPU Lots of RAM Big harddisk. That's it :o) I have 2,53 GHz CPU 1 Gig RAM 5 BIG harddisks and I almost never get irritated about slowness - excpet when rendering with Firefly at high res. But such things ALWAYS go slowly regardless of which 3D app. :] Fish

Poser does not use the graphics card at all, so no need to upgrade it for this reason.

Crossposted with Fish here, but he summed it up quite nicely. Poser eats CPU and RAM, that's the thing to concentrate on.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=1403770

And then the follow up thread http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=1418149.

From our analysis, it really makes little difference how you speed up your system - other than as others have said the video card plays little part, and the memory has a minimum (large!) threshold for a given scene below which it'll thrash.

Faster system = faster Poser execution.

This makes sense that there's no silver bullet - after you get over the initial disappointment - 'cos Poser 4/5 are just more features layered on the same basic "engine" from way, way back, when PC's were much simpler systems. Ergo it can't take advantage of any specific PC - or OS - developements in the last couple of decades!

I upgraded from 1.0gHz/512mb RAM to 2.53gHz/2gigs of RAM. WOW! The new system is in-your-face faster, maybe 3x at least. I have a scene with 50,000 strands of Poser hair that took around 1/2 hour to render on the 1.0gHz system. The newer system handles the same scene in maybe 5 minutes. I think this is largely due to the extra RAM...the older system flailed away with the hard disc on this scene, while the new 2gigs-of-RAM system hardly accesses the hard disc at all. The Windows Task Manager reported a maximum RAM use of 1.4 gigabytes while this render was running. Most renders with one or two figures and a few props max out around 400 to 600 megs or RAM. So it seems like 1 gig RAM is about right, unless you are using lots of Poser hair or unless you are concurrently running some memory hungry program like Photoshop. The technical advantage of lots of RAM is that it keeps the system from using the hard disc for temporary storage when it runs out of RAM...the hard disc is far slower than RAM.