Does anyone think that a Gigabit hub would get good use with the render cows? M3 textures go slow over the network, painfully slow. But once the textures go through things speed up. These M3 textures are 4000 X 4000 is that too excessive? I cut them down to 1500 X 1500 and that helped dramatically. I also consolidated textures in Vue but that had no effect unlike the resolution decrease. What kind of networks do you all use? Is it time to upgrade the network hub and cards or is there not much difference?

I have the option for a gigabit setup, but currently use 10100 through a Netgear router and Linksys 5 port switch. The 4000x2 textures -can- be too big; they were created with Poser and closeups in mind. If you aren't doing extreme closeups, then reducing the resolution is fine. The gigabit setup -should- speed things up, as you are talking about getting resources from the render controller to a disk cache on another machine; that is pretty much strictly and OS issue, and the RenderCow has very little to do with it (aside from making the request for the file, if it even does that). How much of an improvement is dependant on a lot of things. One friend shot his geek wad on a gigabit setup in his house, and missed the part about needing CAT 6 cable. Was not a happy puppy when his hardware throttled down to keep the signals clean....

Thanks Dale B. That stinks for him but there still is something wrong here. Poser materials with good res maps used to fly through the network and now they don't. I'll just accept it and try manage my anger. :-}