Link to my favorite component store, PC Club HERE. opens in new window

I have not seen a thread lately about The Optimal Poser Development Rig. If I missed it, my apologies and would you direct me there please. I am hoping hardware fanatics will see this thread and be willing to chime in. I, for one, really want to learn.

If you wanted to build one single optimal screaming Poser platform, PC (with all due respect to Mac people, of whom I am also one) to be used for delevopment, animating, rendering single frames and short test animations, and running Poser-related tools, what would you buy? (I think renderfarm nodes are a different issue, although of course related)

1. Obviously it is single-processor. And from what I understand the CPU/FSB is the most critical factor, with "mating it with the proper excellent RAM" being second.

2. what is an excellent mating of motherboard, CPU and RAM type/speed/amount?

3. AMD has one CPU that costs hundreds more than the rest of it's line ($900.00) called the AMD Athlon 64 FX55. It has something called (lol) 3DNOW! on board. Is this chip something above and beyond even AMD's other 64 bit chips? Oh, and by the way, does Poser even utilize 64-bit??? Or this chip's power specifically? Link to a sales page about this chip here. Opens in new window.

4. What about the OS? I am not ashamed to admit I use lowly XP Home. I like it. It works. But if it is holding me back from Screamin' Poser, I will ditch it in a second on this rig.

5. are there any render cards that would be optimal for Poser? In otherwords a dedicated add-on card in a slot that would slam Poser Firefly rendering.

6. why is the Hard Drive important? On a five or ten minute render of a frame of animation (not to mention one of those 14-hour massive single frame scene some people build), you are possibly only actually writing 1.5 MB to disk for the TIFF file. That's NOTHING. Other than that short write, why does the system have to access the drive at all during the render? Is it to fetch WindowsXP resources, or to fetch Poser/Firefly resources? And shouldn't there be a way to force those resources into RAM, cache or even a RAM disk?

7. While the video card has no impact on rendering, this is a develpment rig, so, how to be smart about the card so that screen redraw is snappy. You want to move fast...grab/spin a dial, grab/spin a dial, switch from pose room to material room, change body parts, click open the shade tree, back to Pose Room, grab/spin a dial, grab/spin a dial, grab/rotate the camera, etc. etc. but fast with no hesitation. Is this RAM or CPU or VideoCard???

Budget? I want to build this myself, I think. We have "PC CLUB" here in Southern California and I have built two systems buying from them...prices good. Link to PC Club HERE. We also have the famous Fry's Electric here.

What about the wisdom of purchasing a complete system from Boxx or the like. Do they REALLY know something we don't?

I guess I don't have a budget! I want to see what the optimal would be, first. Inevitably there is a 'point of diminishing return' at the top where you can throw the system from, say, $1500 up to $2600, but only get a marginal increase in power. Or from $2200 to $3800!

Thank you,

::::: Opera :::::

haven't followed the link (PC Club is my current fave as well, so I daren't lest I start drooling and never return). CPU speed is important. Aside from the other system performance based issues , cpu speed determines the speed at which rendering will occur. Faster = bestest Motherboard/CPU pairing will be a decision based on experience and success. In 21 years of working with these, ahem, things, I've never known two people to feel the same about anything in specific -- only in general. Inclusive of myself, lol. 3DNow has been around since the K6 days. And is in every AMD chip. It's primary purpose is to serve the same role as the similar instruction sets in the intel chips. Poser is a 32 bit application. Until a 64 bit comes along, it won't do any better on the 64 bit versions or the 32 bit versions. XP (any version) or 2000 are the best choices (PC) for OS. Linux might be if the users of it would stop proclaiming the death of MS long enough to make that a reality and get something that works better and is easier to use. (snicker -- peng's gonna hurt me!) Poser does not make use of any hardware capability in video systems as of poser version 5. 6 may be another story, but I'm personally against it and don't expect that to be the case. So unless you are playing games or using a hardware enabled program, a nice simple card will do. Say, 128MB of video ram just cause. The hard drive is important becuase while the system is calcualting allt he things during a render, it stores information in your swap file. Go to RDNA and do a search int he P5 forum there for my "Five Things" tute (also at PPros) for reasons behind that. As for using a RAMdrive -- yeah, you could, but you'd have to write your own program so that it could pull the data out of the main fork and dissassociate it witht he orignal program so that you aren't caught up in the ongoing limit of 32 bit OS systems : the 2GB per application limit. That is, once you get above 2GB in memory usage, it's over. Whether that's ram or swapfile or both in tandem, that's the ceiling. And it is possible -- look at what Adobe does with Photoshop's scratch disks, for example. Poser doesn't even wait for windows to adjust the swapfile, though -- it wants it all now. So such a program would be pretty handy to have. as far as 7 goes -- those things are all of the above. Asin, what you are describing is overall performance -- and for overall performance, the entirety of the system comes into play. So all of them. I'm off to buy groceries. Good luck!

Opera: (3)The FX-55 is the cadillac of the Clawhammer core chips (The Opteron is the 'Sledgehammer'); it has the biggest internal cache's, a dual memory controller I believe, instead of the single controller that the Athlon 64 has, so you have some serious memory bandwidth to play with. But frankly, the standard Athlon 64 (and better to get the socket 939 version...that way you can upgrade to the dual core chips when they are available) is more than sufficient. While Poser isn't a 64 bit app, in many ways that doesn't matter. The Athlon 64Opteron runs 32 bit code in a native mode; no emulator is needed. The actual pipeline in the chip is quite a bit shorter than the one in Intel's flagship product...which is one big reason AMD chips do as much or nearly as much as an Intel chip clocked 30-50% faster (put it this way; when DEC was broken up by HP, many of their better minds were shopped by AMD. When the Alpha chip was torpedoed, AMD got another infusion of talent that designed one of the best architectures out there). Once XP-64 is out, even if the app itself doesn't use the expanded addressing, the OS will, which will have an impact on the swap file, and the amount of base memory available. Or at least it should. We are talking Microsoft, after all....

A fast drive is essential. I highly recommend WD Raptors, theyre' expensive, but it's the fastest you can get right now. My new rig is an Athlon64 3500+, socket 939, 4 Gb dual channel DDR400 (yes, I know that an app under Win32 can't use more than 2Gb, but this way it can get a full 2 Gb of RAM, while still allowing for the OS and other necessary stuff to be in RAM and have a nice disk cache too). A fast video card seems to help with the preview screens (I've got a GeForce6800LE, works very well!), and those two Raptors in RAID0 are a blessing. Compared with my previous machine, a P4 2.8 HTT with 1.5 Gb DDR400 dual channel, a single 160 Gb disk and a Radeon9600Pro graphics card, this new rig is much, much faster. A third machine, AthlonXP 2700+, 1 Gb DDR333 single channel, 2x80 Gb DiamondMax 9 in RAID0 and a lowly Ti4200 is just about as fast as the P4. Mainly due to the AMD processor and the disks. Conclusion: go AMD, use dual channel DDR400, and get the fastest disk setup you can afford.

I have been absorbing Dale's advice in this thread and on another, and also read ynsaen's incredibly intense tutorial "Five Things." Plus I've been googling and researching and made a call to my PC Club guy.

And...I've come to almost the exact recommendation of svdl above.

I'm going to get almost EXACTLY the sys he/she describes. I had pretty much decided.

AMD Athlon 64 3500 S939 512K, OEM $272.00

GIGABYTE GA-K8NSU-939 nF3 250U ATX $129.99 Info page here.

4 x 1024MB Corsair DDR400 TwinX Dual Memory (TWINX1024-3200XL) Unit price: $299.99 $1,199.96

36GB Western Digital 10,000rpm SATA (WD360GD) Unit price: $129.99 $259.98

Fortunately, I already have a great keyboard, mouse, speaker, video card (MSI StarForce NVIDIA GeForce FX 5600 with AGP8X) and monitor (Sony GDMFW900 24" CRT). Unless you guys have any comments, I'll figure out the case (350W power supply) and cooling issues at PCClub.

Still, that adds up to $1901.00 (Yikes!) plus a new seat of Poser5 ($99.00) and bill gates share is not in there yet.

Win XP, but Pro or Home, does it matter? I have only worked with home.

::::: Opera :::::

nah -- no real diff for use with poser -- however, if you are going to be networking it, a seat of Pro might come in handy.

one or two things more... I have no idea how to evaluate the motherboard. I don't need fancy sound, just an ethernet port and some USB ports. I DO need it to be spectacular with the RAM and CPU, however. And reliable. Also, do I need controllers for the two Raptors? I read somewhere that to be optimal they should be on separate controllers. Last.....I am still trying to find out if this is a crazy idea: what about a RAM disk? Can't I put the Poser.exe and the swap file, and maybe even my stripped-out Runtime folder on a RAM Disk? I'd still write the output TIFF files to regular HD, so I'd only lose one frame if the RAM disk goes down. So, what's wrong with this idea? ynsaen, your sentences about this above...I did not completely grok them. I am tired now, i'll read them again tomorrow. Thank you all again for your generous help. It's pretty stressful making a purchase of this size, but I am going to do it. My partner in crime on the movie I want to make viewed a 24-second animation I just finished today, and gave me the green light on the funds. I'll be able to post a link to that animation later this week. ::::: Opera ::::

The Raptors are Serial ATA, so they are on separate controllers. An nForce3 chipset has built-in RAID, so you're all set. I'd recommend 2x 73 Gb Raptors though, 2x 36 Gb will be full before you know it. Maybe a big ATA133 drive for mass storage, (in the system I described above I've also got 2x160 Gb ATA133 drives in RAID0 for mass storage). As for the Win version: if you connect to the Internet, I'd recommend XP Pro, less vulnerable to hackers than XP Home. I highly recommend buying a good case, Antec or Chieftec, with a strong power supply, at least 350 Watt. A RAM disk is not a good idea. It would only benefit Poser and a few parts of the OS you put in there, but it would eat away a lot of space from the system cache. The syscem cache benefits Poser almost as much as a RAM disk (I expect less than 1% difference), but it benefits EVERY process on the system. The idea of RAM disk is obsolete. Hope this helps, Steven.

My personal preference is to go with the 'Pro' version of anything, so far as the OS is concerned. It usually means that you have a the full toolset with regards to creating and managing a network, as well as a host of other things that can come in handy for maintenance and tweaking. You might want to check out the prices at newegg.com. The board you specify is $13 cheaper at NewEgg. In general it's a good board; the -only- caveats to be aware of is the NForce 4 chipset has =just= been released, so that technically makes the Nforce 3 chipset 'old' (that said, the Nforce 4 hasn't proven itself, so I'd avoid it for a few months at least). Another caveat is the strip plugs that Gigabyte uses (they'll have things like usb and firewire ports in an injection molded strip plug that goes in an unused backplane slot). If you build it yourself, and the system refuses to switch on, unplug those nifty strips. Whoever makes them seems to screw up fairly regularly and grounds out one of more of the data ports, preventing the motherboard from powering on. One thing about the SATA drive. Make =CERTAIN= you have enough cooling for that puppy. SATA drives are more vulnerable that PATA drives to heat death, and they generate considerably more heat, both mechanically and electronically. I lost the first SATA drive I used to heat within 60 days of getting it (I placed it in a bay at the bottom of my main tower. Thought the front case fans would be sufficient cooling. I was wrong); the next two drives I installed I placed in Antec HDD cooler bays. Basically, they fit in a full sized bay, are solid aluminum heat sinks with dual fans in the front plate to pull room air in and over the drive. The version I have also has an LED thermometer with two probes to monitor system temperature (The way I have it set up, one probe is taped right on the drive spindle, which is the hottest mechanical point, and the other hangs free in the case, giving me temperatures at certain places that might not have enough air flow). SATA and PATA drives can co-exist happily, so keep the idea of adding a Promise HDD controller card to your system, and just hanging a new drive onto it whenever you start feeling cramped for storage space in the back of your mind.

tremendous advice, thank you both.

I believe I won't need more than the 2 x 36 Gb because NOTHING else but specific Poser development will be on this machine. Poser, my slender Runtime, the current pz3s I am animating and recent raw output of frames in folders. As I generate folders of TIFF or PNG frames, they will be offloaded to another computer. I have a 250GB external firewire for that, and I could install a large HD yet, internal as well.

Now, I have heard about the heat issues with this Raptor, of course. I will completely adhere to both of your warnings about a strong case and adequate heat protection. Basically, I'm going to look my salesman in the eye and say "Don't let me burn out these drives. If I do, I'll be bringing them back in here with heat in my eyes." Dale, thanks for the description of your heat-monitoring devices...that will arm me.

I am nervous about the motherboard. I chose the Gigabyte over Asus or ABit because of other things you have written, Dale. Should I have them order a Tyan board? They don't normally stock/sell them. My guy suggested Gigabyte, and since you mentioned you have the board in some systems, I selected it. I don't know if it's even the right Gigabyte, for that matter. Is this the right board to make these other high-end components all scream and be happy?

If I don't hear back from you, I am going with that board because you are saying in general it is a good board.

I am going to check Crucial for their current prices, just so I know when negotiating the final prices on this sys. PC Club is 'flexible.' I DO want to buy there, becuase I can walk in with problems. They are excellent about that. I'll mosey over to newegg also.

I am officially surrendering the RAM Disk obsession. Thanks guys.

::::: Opera :::::

Attached Link: http://www.crucial.com/store/listmodule.asp?module=DDR2+PC2-3200&Attrib=Package&cat=RAM

I don't have a Gigabyte board, I've got an MSI. Good stuff. Built the rig myself, it started right away and has been stable ever since. I haven't overclocked anything - performance increase is usually not very much, but the heat production and stability problems can be serious. Dale is definitely right about cooling the drives. Since those Raptors are not full SATA they have a Marvel SATA/PATA interface chip, and that chip tends to get extremely hot, be sure to cool them! I've got two drive coolers in my system, one case cooler, one cooler at the power supply, and of course the CPU cooler, chipset cooler and GPU cooler. It's a regular tornado in that case! I'm not too sure about DDR2. At the moment it is more expensive than DDR400, and the performance is about the same. As far as I know, the MSI board accepts DDR2, but I chose 4x1Gb DDR400 (Transcend), just as fast and a lot cheaper. Tyan boards are top of the bill, especially if you want to go multiprocessor. But they're also quite expensive. For Poser, multiprocessor is useless, so you'd better spend that money on RAM and hard drives. If you can find them, try to go for 2 Gb memory sticks, or 1 Gb single-sided sticks. Then you only have to use 2 sticks, which means you can run the memory channels safely at 200 Mhz; with 4 double-sided sticks most systems clock down to 166 Mhz. Overclocking the memory to 200 Mhz often results in stability problems in such a case.

lads lads... you can break the 2GB limit on windows. you mention what version to run of windows. well Windows Xp Server can break the 2gb limit. based on experience, you can use that for a workstation.. nothing says it has to be a server ;) well.. cost does.. but...

Khai, you're right about Win2003Server: the Enterprise and DataCenter edition can handle 3 Gb per app, by removing the rather artificial boundary between executable space and DLL space. I'm not sure whether Standard can do that too. XP Home and Pro certainly can't.

tis why I'm saving for a copy of Server ;)

That won't be worth it. If you read the MS knowledge base, it'll only assign 3GB RAM to applications that were explicitly written with the server OS in mind. Plus, with the correct start option, you can make XP do the same. If you plan to use a RAID-0, then, for the love of god, MAKE BACKUPS! Everyone tells you a RAID-0 makes it faster, but many don't tell you that it'll also be faster at losing data. When one drive in you RAID-0 fails, the data on all the drives becomes useless. Using two hard drives in a RAID-0 means it's twice as likely fail as if you had just one of these drives.

thanks for that, stewar. Hopefully everyone reading this in the future will listen to you very very carefully. Luckily I am already aware because of another Raid-0 deployment that the client learned the hard way the cost of disregarding my advice. He comes to me with one drive fried..."But we have everything on the other drive, right?...." That was a rueful day. This is another reason I am going with the smaller Raptors....to discourage the saving of anything vital on them! Do any of you have any opinion on this: to get maximum speed, is it better to Raid-0 and just throw Poser,Runtime,OS and swapfile on the Raid volume, or is better to NOT Raid-0 and carefully put the swapfile on it's one Raptor all by itself (With the OS, Poser and Runtime on the other?) Do I (gasp) actually need three drives? ::::: Opera :::::

and i like how stewar just drops that little 'oh by the way' OS startup tidbit in the stream. ::::: Opera :::::

Raid-0 and backups: sure, that's why I recommend another (big, slower) drive as a backup. By the way, those Raptors have a MTBF about three times as big as the regular IDE disks, since the mechanical and magnetic parts come from the SCSI line. Which means two Raptors in a RAID-0 still have a better MTBF than a single regular IDE. If you want to play safe, you go for 4 Raptors and a RAID 0+1 config. Expensive, but both very fast and very safe.

stewer, thanks for the XP tip, I didn't know that one! Can be pretty useful when running SQL Server and IIS on a development rig. And I remember having to set a compiler switch to have an app break the 2 Gb boundary, totally forgot about it..

I think you'd liquid nitrogen cooling on that 4-raptor rig! Nope, going for the two small raptors with my external firewire HD to offload, post-processing on another computer and burn to DVD backup, offsite storage of DVDs. ::::: Opera :::::

okay, the system is in process of purchase. they are doing a little more research on optimal memory/motherboard sympatico. Question..... I will now have a machine with a 72 Gig "HD" which is my Raid-0 volume. XP Pro has been installed. (sidebar: there is an external 250 firewire on hand to take work off as completed) 1) is XPPro in fact installed completely on one disc, and THEN the raid array gets constructed? Or is the Raid-0 established on the Motherboard settings, and you install the operating sys and it gets 'arranged' across more than one disk? 2) how and at what amount would you set the swapfile? 3) installing Poser5.exe installing Runtime installing folder for my work in process (pz3s) .... do I just install them on "The Volume" or (despite it being a Raid-0 situation) is there a way (and is it smart) to start them out on one "disc"? Apologies ahead of time for naive Raid-0 questions. Was not involved in these decisions last time I was around a Raid-0 installation. Thanks, ::::: Opera :::::

Before you install the OS, you'll have to configure the RAID array from the BIOS. When you've done that, you install the OS. The RAID array presents itself to the OS as a SCSI disk, so you'll have to install the drivers during the OS install - don't forget to press F6 in the first (text-based) part of the setup! But maybe everything has already been configured when you get the machine. Easy to check: just go to the disk manager and look whether the OS sees one disk or two. Be sure to check this, one of my previous rigs was assembled by the store, I definitely specified a Raid-0 config, but they hadn't configured the BIOS. So I had to reconfigure the drives and reinstall the OS. Do not trust computer sellers to do it right! The OS sees the array as a single drive. Just partition it like you would a normal drive. I'd recommend one partition of about 8-10 Gb for the OS plus swapfile, one partition for your applications, one partition for data, and one for images. The image partition should be FAT32. A nice trick is to redirect the Documents and Settings from the OS partition to the data partition, that way you won't lose data when (not if!) the OS becomes really corrupted. Swap file: usually 1.5 times physical RAM is recommended, but there's a maximum of 4 Gb. I've set both min and max to 4 Gb on my newest rig. Set min and max to the same value, that prevents fragmentation. There is no way to place something on "just one" disk of the array. Each and every file will be divided evenly among the drives - that's also the reason that a single drive failure will be the end of ALL your files. For Poser: multiple runtimes is definitely recommended. These multiple runtimes don't have to be subfolders of the main Poser folder, they don't even have to be on the same drive - or machine, it also works over a network. Not recommended, you want runtimes on the fastest medium you've got! Hope this helps, Steven.

About the images partition: use Ghost or a similar partition imaging tool to make an image of both the system and application partition, just after you've organised the machine the way you want. Most of these programs boot from DOS and need a FAT(32) partition to store their images. Some can write directly to CD-R(W) or DVD+/-R(W), in that case you don't need an images partition. Be sure to burn the images to CD/DVD. When your OS dies - it will, sooner or later! - boot from a DOS disk with CDROM driver and imaging software, and restore your system from the images. Takes about half an hour. This imaging procedure has been a lifesaver for me on several occasions. I HIGHLY recommend making those images. Steven.

Thank you Steven, that information is gold. Really. The store, PC Club, IS going to install everything. I asked them to. Normally, I would build for the learning experience. But I just do not have time right now to go all the way up that hill. I may regret it later, I know DaleB will probably be unhappy to hear my choice...but these are the choices of life. I am animating heavily, dealing with my characters and shadows and rain and audio. Anyway, the store manager is supervising the build, and I will SURELY confont him with your advice in the above post, and I WILL check everything before I begin to install Poser, etc. ::::: Opera :::::

I DID decide to go for 4Gig Ram, on the belief that although Poser will only utilize 2Gig, the OS/swap file, etc. will enjoy the breathing room of the rest. Is that an acurate assumption? ::::: Opera :::::

It is. That's why I installed 4Gig in my rig too, and it certainly helps keeping the system up to speed. Steven.

You...you...didn't do it....YOURSELF....(sniff sniff)? Actually, if you are in the midst of an active project, you made the right choice...at least as long as you keep the warranty information in a safe place... >:) Rushing through a build is an excellent way of messing up, big time (oh, the techie stories I could tell....). The 4 gigs is a very good idea, with the impending release of XP-64; that ram will get some excercise. Waiting to see that link.....

::::::: smiling opera ::::: hi dale, yeah, I need to put in the time animating now rather than the build. I will have the new machine in 2 days. Will report back in then. Can't wait to do my first render!. ::::: Opera :::::

Update and request for more insight. PC Club is really taking my order and running with it. I think they want to prove out this system for themselves so they have the moxie to put monsters together. Anyway... They are getting spectacular ratings on the overnight benchmark tests on the RAM, the Motherboard and the Raptor Array. They have more things they want to do, so I am patient and letting them have their way with the sys! My salesman Jeffery just called. He wanted to give me the heads-up that apparently on the PC 4Gigs of memory is nice, but does not yield 4Gigs usable...they are getting readings of 3.6 GIG yeild, with the issue being that XPPro is loading Southbridge into memory and that is locking up the .4 gig missing. He said 'none of the motherboard manufactures seem to think this is anything negative' and that in addition to the actual numbers they are seeing on the gigabyte board (bios 3.7G, windows3.8) that the other boards' user manuals say that effect will also show up on theirs. Abit said their board would be very close to 4Gig, but at 333, not 400. I nixed that notion. Any comments from you guys? BTW, here are the boards that were considered, we are going with the gigabyte. ASUS ASV Deluxe ABIT KAT800-939 AV8 GIGABYTE KSTriton series, NS Ultra-939 Jeffery said "This thing is really flying" about the system so far. I am drooling. ::::: Opera :::::

About not showing the full four Gigs, that's right. Has to do with addressing schemes in XP: the southbridge addresses overlap with RAM, so that piece of RAM is not available. Happens on every mainboard with 4 Gigs. My MSI reports 3.8 Gigs. I would love to get my hands on a Win64 beta. I'd expect the southbridge address range being mapped to adresses above the physical RAM, so that I'd have the full 4 Gigs again. And I'd expect the OS to make full use of the 64 bit processor too... I ran some benchmarks on my system too (SiSoft Sandra 2004). Especially the Raptor RAID 0 array was blindingly fast, and the CPU performed very well too. RAM was not spectacular, about the same as on my P4 2.8 Dual Channel DDR400 rig (well, that is not unexpected). Steven.

thanks for the confirmation Steven. ::::: Opera :::::

UPDATE:

Well, I've got my new system, although
I had to leave it in the box for a full
48 hours once I got it home, due to an
intense 'day-job' crisis. You can
imagine my frustration with that!

So here's my report on my first 24 hours....

Sys boots really fast.
Computer is loud. 2 Raptors plus four fans....loud.
But I expected that, and accept it.

Poser runs like lightening, as you might
expect. Very very responsive moving around
and changing rooms. That is what I wanted.
I did a render benchmark against my
other two PCs. To recap the new system:

AMD Athlon 3500+ XP
GIGABYTE KSTriton series, NS Ultra-939
4 GIG Mushkin RAM (yeild 3.62 Gig)
2 37-Gig Maxtor Raptor Hard Drives
Raid-0 Array
Windows XP Pro, Page File 4.2 Gig
Nvidia GForce 6800 video card

My benchmark pz3 is one character
Poser5Woman + EJ with head and body
textures and bump maps. Heavy shaders
due to face_off Real Skin Shader.
Danae's Bliss Vision Hair, long, with
texture.

Three spot lights, two no shadow, all white.
Main light shadow map 480, shining thru
slatted blinds. Dolly camera at 135mm.
No ray-trace.

Render settings
min shading rate .100
pixel samples 4
'cast shadow' only checked option
image size 500x550

From XP desktop to fully loaded pz3 = 8 seconds.

Sys1 P4 2.4Ghz 1GigRam 191 seconds
Sys2 AMD 2800 1GigRam 227 seconds
Sys3 AMD 3500 (above) 127 seconds

I am happy.

Thank all of you for your interest, brains and
clear explanations. I really appreciate the
time and caring you guys gave.

::::: Opera :::::

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=1403770Mser Resources - Microsoft Internet

Render with no adjustment.... 159 seconds!

I am happy.

::::: Opera :::::

Message edited on: 01/25/2005 21:05

Got pointed to this thread by Operaguy. You're all talking about speed, which is all good and well, but the problem I have is renders just crapping out from apparently too many polys, or something similar. I don't see anything mentioned in here that will prevent that. And as far as having 4 gig. Will that really help that much? I have 1 gig now, and have my swapfile set to 2gig max, but the RAM usage never gets much past 600 meg, while the swapfile usage is just over 1 gig. How will adding more RAM change how P5 utlizes the swapfile?

jeff, you should simply post a link back to your thread and invite people over there. So this thread (as a research tool for future inquirers) does not go OT. ::::: Opera :::::

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=2092685

could someone please update this to 2007??  we alread have processors like the Intel Core 2 Extreme Quad-Core Processo, so there must be an even better rig for Poser than what was in 2005...

thanks for any info

maybe somebody could also update this 2005 thread as to whether poser is a 64-bit app yet. and whether it works better in a 64-bit OS, even if it ain't a 64-bit app.