go to your poser directory...(wherever Poser.exe is)
right click, select "new", make a new blank text file...
rename the text file "Poser.bat" (no quotes)

right click your new Poser.bat file, choose "edit"
then type the following:

"cmd /c start /High Poser.exe" (no quotes)

the above "c" in the command line is assuming your poser.exe is on your "c" drive...if it isn't, change this to whatever drive letter is...(for example, "d start" if it's on yer "d" drive (no quotes)

right click your new poser.bat file, send to desktop as a shortcut...

Now, close everything..
click on your new shortcut (Poser.bat), and Poser will open with "high" CPU priority setting... instead of "normal".
there is also "above normal" which is 1 step above normal in CPU priority, and "realtime" which assigns 100percent of CPU power to the proggy (not recommended unless you have a dual processor system)

your old poser.exe will still work fine, just at "normal" CPU priority...
I immediately noticed a huge difference in opening my directories (for example, my "poses" list is HUGE, and delays when I click it before opening)....everything opens up a heck of a lot faster..
RENDER TIMES ARE MUCH FASTER!!!!!
No guaruntees, and do this at your own risk...
It sure woiked for me tho!
(PPP and XP Home)

Message edited on: 12/30/2004 02:49

In other words, who makes Poser slow is Windows and not Poser itself.

naw, I wont say THAT (lol).. but this will at least force Windows to throw more "power" at it....
;)

Message edited on: 12/30/2004 03:03

Message edited on: 12/30/2004 03:05

The geek in me wouldn't recommend for any Poser newbie to do this. I use XP Pro on a laptop with little room to spare and Poser4 fires up just fine. I even had Daz Studio installed at one point and it was never slow on windows. What works for you may not work for others. Windows tends to eatup a lot of resources and any 3D program you install will be a file hog and memory hog. So, I'm not sure how doing what you did made Poser load any faster than normal? Not douting you, just curious why you were slow to begin with? are you working with Poser4 or 5?;)

The fastest Windows is the old Windows 95, Win95 allocates 100% of CPU to Poser (if is the only task running) so I run Poser under Win95!!!!

You can do the same thing using the Task Manager once you have started Poser:

Bring up the Task Manager and open the "Processes" tab.

Find Poser.exe, right-click and set "Priority" to "High".

While you're at it, you can close a number of unnecessary processes in the list to free up more resources for Poser.

zippyozzy: yes, actually it all worked fine on my machine to begin with.. I'm one of those people who always try to push things to the limit, or a little harder. (lol) My system is an AMD 3200XP, winXP, gig of 400Mhz RAM, 256 meg vid card, Sata drives... What I noticed being "faster" was the render times, and when I say "load times", I meant the individual directories, like when you click on "poses" tab within Poser itself....as it(mine) is very large, before I did this, it tended to take a few seconds before the "poses" list would come up (seektimes??). Now, it's instant. Nothing "better" with it other than shaving off a few seconds here and there for us impatient folk!. It seem to add up after a while, 'specially with render times. ;) Kelderek, you are correct. Only this way, you dont have to do it everytime...simply click the batch file and go..(another few seconds)

oh ok lol I see what you mean. I have a Dell Laptop. with 5gigs heh. I usualy delete some of Posers useless stuff tht I'll never use anyway like some of the geoms & poses & even the props so I don't notice any difference in the load time or the rendering time. Actually when I use Bryce it takes ten times longer for me to render than in Poser. ;)

P4 is fast. Try P5. Don't get me wrong, it's worth it...but it's a much greater resource hit than P4 or PP.

I would be careful about using this trick. Although it does speed up Poser, it slows down eveything else... this is fine if you're only using Poser, but may be bad if you need to switch to Photoshop to work on a texture or Windows Explorer to check on a file. And this trick will also work for any program- just bring up the Task Manager, select the program, and set to "High Priority". --John

John's right .... I forgot to mention that.. I do this when I am only using Poser and nothing else. Im not the best "multitasker", so it seems I always use 1 at a time (program or app). Having said this, this tweak works for me great.

Doesn't make a visible difference on my system. (XP home). Startup was the same; loading a figure seemed to be the same; a render took 74 seconds on the "high road" vs 77 seconds on the "low road".

I live for multitasking (even have multiple processors). There are times when I'll have ten or more applications running (Poser, C4D, Visual C++, Help, Word, PhotoShop, UltraEdit, Acrobat, Mozilla, Outlook, DirectoryOpus once or twice, and so on). This is because I'm working on a Poser->C4D plugin, updating documentation, coding, checking user responses, and so on. That said, it'd be wonderful to be able to have (another) computer solely dedicated to Poser that could tweaked to the max for maximum efficiency - Poser 5 desparately needs it. Changing priorities of an app like Poser whilst in the midst of all of this is very bad. Poser will chomp an entire processor and the rest of the processes will be huddled together in a corner whimpering. And as ockham noticed, there will probably not be much performance increase for most of us.

I'm willing to give it a try. Maybe "above normal" would be a good compromise between normal and high?

Everything else aside, Poser rendering, most especially Poser 5's, is slow. This is not something you can easily optimize with tweaks and settings. There are some ways to reduce render times within Poser using intelligent approaches (e.g.: hiding body parts under clothing or using texture maps at resolutions that are commensurate with the scene size - instead of 8192x8192 size maps for a character rendered in a 64x64 pixel area). But, in the end, the only two ways to truly increase rendering speeds are: 1. Faster computer - faster FSB, faster processor, wider pipelines. 2. Kidnap the programmers responsible and force them to optimize the render engine code, since making requests will not have any effect for at least a year or two.

I tried altering the settings in Task Manager and it made absolutely no difference at all on my system.

It may not work on all systems. It's hard to tell what everybody else has running in their backgrounds...Everyone has other (different) software and apps..
Having said that, you may not notice the difference that I have.
In XP, I also disable all the "useless" services that are running (from services.msc in the command line) in the background and using precious recources...So, my system services are minimal, "gutted" for (at least in my own mind) for 3d apps that I use, and Stereoscopic apps..
In the end, on a 30 frame animation with V3, and high-res textures, scene, lighting and props, the "high priority" setting shaved 2.26 minutes off the final rendered avi.
This is significant to me..
I am very happy I did this, heehee please dont yank the rug out from under my self-proclaimed glory....(lol)
2.26 minutes on a small animation with hi res settings and lighting is awesome... This seems to be a consistent number as I tried it 5 or 6 times to be sure...I wonder if the CPU load is "progressive" with Poser??...meaning it slows with use. I suspect it is, but I never checked... Maybe there is no performace hit with regular use and renders, but perhaps the higher priority setting somehow "locks" the CPU load for the app and it dont slow down....and this is where I may be getting the lower render time numbers... if this is the case, well again, 2.26 minutes off a 30 frame animation! (yaaaaaaaaaaay) Im sticking with it for now... As far as Windows saying 100 percent CPU usage, Ive never really trusted that reading within Windows. The numbers that show and "proove" whats goin on can be found using other "benchmarking" proggys dedicated for that purpose...and always read differntly that the windows readings.. Think of it this way... Windows needs certain things to run, regardless of using another App by itself.. For example... the service "explorer.exe" is one of your highest CPU load thingys running....nothing will work without this (obviously).. CTL-ALT-DEL, find it in your task manager under processes and shut it down..see what happens... a few others cannot be shut down too, and still have windows run. This is why I dont "believe" the CPU load numbers Winders tells ya Poser is using (100 percent CPU usage) because if it really was using 100 %, nothing else could work (like explorer, or the other required services needed to make windows run)... Now Im just blabbin.. thinkin aloud Just a tip that I found worked for me and 2.26 minutes makes me ...well..... jiggy! :) Hope someone can use it besides me.

That's good to hear. I'm not really trying to 'rain on your parade', just warning that there is no panacea to this situation but by real solutions - none forthcoming from either M$ or CL. Explorer.exe is not a 'service'. It IS Windows, for the most part. Explorer is the GUI and shell of Windows. This is why when you kill Explorer.exe, Windows either 'resets' or crashes. And there are ways to change it, say for instance, to a 3.1 interface by using a different GUI (the ole' file manager - don't know where they hid it in XP). That would explain why it's such a hog - it manages all of the informational and visual resources you get in Windows. I use DirectoryOpus which is a port of an amazing Amiga file manager. It replaces Explorer (the app) for file management, but not even it can replace explorer.exe unless it becomes a full Windows management system. It is not.

"I'm not really trying to 'rain on your parade'" never took it that way..no worries here! again, 2.26 minutes off a short animation. Im "giddy" hehehehehehehehhehehe

"Explorer.exe is not a 'service'. It IS Windows, for the most part. Explorer is the GUI and shell of Windows. This is why when you kill Explorer.exe, Windows either 'resets' or crashes. And there are ways to change it, say for instance, to a 3.1 interface by using a different GUI (the ole' file manager - don't know where they hid it in XP)." Litestep, Talisman, WindowBlinds Desktop.. all replace Explorer as the main GUI.. (and with LS a bit more stable as well!) - warning tho : some programs require Explorer.. so experiment if you go this path...

hmmm that sounds cool. Im looking into it now. thanks fer the tip

WindowBlinds is even more graphically intensive than XP, so don't expect it to increase performance. I used it for a while using Win98 and 2000, but it was too unstable then for my activities.

In *nix, Linux, or Mac OSX by using the nice command, which is where Win2k and XP got the idea in the first place ;) (Dunno how? In OSX, go to Utilities in Applications, pull up Terminal, and before you do anything in that terminal, type man nice to get a quick and dirty manual on how to use the thing.) Something to consider, though... back when I used Windows, I had noticed that when doing a render in Vue, I had to actually throttle down the process for Vue, else my music began to choke. Poser OTOH didn't require that, but if you start jacking up process priorities it does come at the expense of other things (and if you want to lock up your machine nice and hard, jack that puppy up to "Realtime" in 'doze...) /P