I've just started using Poser 5 and I'm running it on a Mac 1Ghz G4 in OS 10.3.3 but it runs very slowly. This doesn't seem right based upon the program's stated system requirements. I've looked for a preference that might be adjusted to speed things up but to no avail. Such slow reaction's making it very difficult to learn new software. Is this just novice ignorance? If so please be a guiding light. Cheers.

I have G4 733 hz and Poser 5 run very well, only have problems where I open this software, is slow, but after not have problems.

do you have all the updates check the curious labs site

I hate to be the person to give you the bad news, but Poser 5 is slow. It doesn't matter if you are on a PC or a Mac. You can get some help on your rendering times by using the tips on this site. http://www.keindesign.de/stefan/poser/renderer.html

its true Poser5 is slow even on very powerful hig end PC's :-(

To echo what Davidgibson was saying, P5 is terribly slow on start up and on rendering. I'm on a dual gig G4 with 1.75gig of ram and P5 is the slowest of all my 3D apps in terms of getting things done. I just learn to do other things while waiting. :-( good luck! -jay

I don't know about MAC but I think checking if you have the latest patch might be a good idea. Maybe this can fix this problem for you. " its true Poser5 is slow even on very powerful hig end PC's" Nope, it's not. No problems at all over here.

Try changing to a less demanding DocStyle, or switch to, Fast tracking. Only those of us with dual channel RAM, are able to Full track the textured setting.

Open the activity viewer and have a look at the processes you are running. Turning off the network helps. Then look at the amount of virtual memory Poser uses - I had Poser making scratchfiles over one gig. More memory helps definitely even on a slower machine. If you are really ambitious you can give more processor cycles to Poser, but it does not change much.

Jim Burton did a speed survey using a pz3 benchmark file with Poser 5. Quite a few people responded, and the results indicated that Poser 5 renders the scene about 3 times slower for G4s and G5s than for Wintel boxes of the same clock speed. E.g.: IIRC a 1.8 GHz G5 runs the render at the same speed as a 600 MHz Pentium (around 92 seconds). This is the only 3D app I know that is slower in OS X than in XP Pro. All the others are faster AFAIK.

Thank you all for the helpful insights. I hadn't even got as far as rendering anything with Poser 5, the program as a whole was SLOW: Stopping to process for each operation. Having taken the above advice I installed the latest patch upgrade and performance is now what I would have expected. This is the first time I've used a community/forum and I'm so impressed with the knowledge, talent and generosity on display. Thank you again.

233 mgz pentium II, 96 megs ram, 10 gig c drive, 500 meg d drive, running windows xp pro. Survival techniques--patience, coffee, and the love of doing it! (That and I'm probably the only person out there that dedicated an entire hard drive to page file.) I may be slow, but I look just as good in the end.

Don't do any posing with full texuring view-- it's impossibly slow. Find a view that you can see fairly well with-- don't remember whatg mine was called-- smooth shading?-- and only change to full texture for goof checks, like is the shirt coming through the leg. I have a 3.3G Pentium 4 with 1G memory and unless I have around 16G's free for virtual memory, things can get glacial-- at times, then again there are times it doesn't. More than 2 unimesh figures ups the time as well, usually though I had no problems rendering Montana and another Vicki3 poledancing for the Freak for my xmAS Card-- they weren't wearing much though. On the whole the slowness of the program is why i recommend people start with Poser 4-- the renderer isn't as good but it's fast!!! I susupect that those who say they have no p0roblems are perhaps using Judy and Don instead of V3 and M3. Emily

Memory is critical. Poser eats a lot; a moderately complicated scene can easily take well over 1Gb to render. Whether Windows or Mac, the system is using a fair amount of memory already, and even if you have 1.5Gb Poser is going to be paging a lot. That slows things down immensely. Better paging helps; and that means Mac OS X is better than Mac OS 9, Win XP is better than Win 98; etc.

Right now, for example, I happen to have a render running behind this browser. Mac OS X 10.3.4, dual 1Ghz G4 with 1.5Gb. Poser is taking only about 89% CPU (and despite not being explicitly multiprocessor-aware, that's NOT all one CPU, because some of the OS subsystems Poser uses are threaded), and there's idle CPU time on both processors. In other words, a faster processor wouldn't make much difference. But Poser's total virtual memory is 2.55Gb; of which only 940Mb is in physical memory; there are virtually no free pages. (That's with 4 Vickis and a global lighting setup with lots of lights.) The system is averaging a couple of hundred pagefaults (meaning something needs memory that's currently in a paging file on disk) every second; and probably most of that is Poser. It adds up.

Any graphics application is going to eat memory; but some, like Photoshop and various high-end 3D apps devote substantial engineering time to optimizing their memory management; knowing that it can make a big difference in performance.

If you want Poser to run faster, more memory is probably going to help a lot more than a faster CPU. In this particular case, if I had 2.5Gb free physical memory, I suspect Poser would be waddling along sprightly enough. (And once you get rid of the paging, THEN you may well find that a faster CPU will help even more... but I'm holding out for the 2nd generation G5s ;-) )