Being somewhat new to a serious interest in Poser, I am curious about what would be considered an excellent system when it comes to rendering. I am speaking in terms of RAM, video card, virtual memory, and any other necessary specifications required to render with ease and speed. I have a Windows based computer, 1.8 Mgh, 80 Gig hard drive, and 256 RAM. It does the job, but is sometimes really slow, and has to bring up more virtual memory off the hard drive. I have seen in some places talk of 1 gig RAM. If so, how is it achieved? Bigger memory card, better video card? Thanks for any and all suggestions.

I'd recommend at least 512MB of system memory for Poser, and a full gigabyte is better. Some motherboards won't support that much memory. Which version of Windows do you have? XP seems to handle memory better than earlier versions. The video card will have little if any impact on performance; Poser, at this time, doesn't use 3D hardware acceleration. Upgrading the card might help with other applications, however. Your best bet is to upgrade the memory first, if possible, and then consider a faster processor and motherboard.

I had 512 MB of memory in my computer and Poser 5 would really bog down. I upgraded to 1 GB of ram and now Poser runs like a champ. Looking at the Windows Task Manager under the Performance tab I can see that of the Physical Memory Total of 1047284 K, I have 554744 Available. Which means before neary all of the physical memory was being used up with Poser running, which was why it was probably bogging down. Check your Task Manager and see how much memory you have left with Poser running, if not much, upgrade your memory and that will probably be all you need to do.

I agree with everything already said. I would just add these thoughts:

Poser 4 or Pro Pack is less demanding in the memory department than Poser 5, but I think you want at least 512 MB in either case. RAM's pretty cheap nowadays, but you'll need to check your system specs (OS, motherboard, etc) to see how your memory is setup now and what your system capacity is. The websites for the big memory makers (PNY, Kingston, etc) have databases you can access to see what the options are for your exact system, so you may to check them out.

The processor speed you have seems perfectly adequate, scene loading and renders will just take a bit longer than if you had a 3 GHZ system.

In a nutshell, get the biggest and baddest computer with the largest hard drive you can afford. Barring that fantasy, look for the fastest CPU you can get, but you will survive with a slower one. I have a 1gig Duron, and it gets by. Memory, start out with 1Gig if you can. Your 80GB hard drive is likely almost full already. The ideal would be to have at least a 120 GB hard drive reserved for your Poser installation and working files. Poser works much better if it doesn't share the same hard drive as your operating system. I can't afford the biggest and baddest. Each time I can afford to get a larger hard drive, one of the old ones gets recycled for something else. Windows XP and most of my other software sits on a 20GB hard drive. Poser 5 gets the 120GB. A 40GB hard drive is used for my Projects.

Definitely fastest CPU possible. Although I have two, one is still 2.66 GHz provided to Poser. Even with this, it took 5 minutes to render 90 frame images at 91x91 pixels. Cinema4D, although utilizing HT and both processors, could do this in 10 seconds (or less). Figure that limiting C4D to one processor and no HT would make this a whopping 40 seconds. Poser rendering needs to be improved greatly.

Video Card: you don't need the latest but I found a video upgrade, last summer, did improve things a lot. It may have been driver stability. Certainly, if you use your computer for other stuff besides Poser the video needs a little more thought. My old card was a 4-year-old design, and replacing it has improved performance with other software.