Attached Link: http://www.winterwolves.com/

Hello there, I've been using Daz and some Renderosity products and Poser for about 1 year to make the graphics of my shareware games. Recently I upgraded to Poser 5 thinking of getting more speed for the renders, but I realized that maybe the biggest problem is the RAM of my Pc. I currently have "only" 512mb ram. What is a good system to do complex render in Poser? I just made a render with 2 characters fully dressed ([see this link](http://www.winterwolves.net/main.jpg)) and the speed was astonishing slow (not only rendering speed, but even normal operation), the hard-disk started to swap continuously and I even got a "out of virtual ram" error (very unusual!!). Anyone has any recommendation on this? or maybe how to reduce memory usage in poser for complex scenes?

Thanks

p.s. maybe I just need to get 1Gb of Ram...

Message edited on: 02/12/2005 05:41

I'd suggest 2Gb if you can afford it, Poser5 is a greedy beast & at times even 1Gb isn't enough for my copy.

Woah, even 1Gb is too low!? surely Poser is greedy :) Well I'll think about it, right now I have to decide if is better to get more ram only or to get a new pc (currently I have an Athlon 1.6Ghz and isn't very fast for renders...!)

I have a 2.0Ghz Pentium 4 with 1Gb or ram & at times Poser5 is slower than poser4, I have ripped the content paradise out though which does give a small speed improvement, check out http://www.poserpros.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=16569 if you haven't already :)

Wow! Thanks for the tip! :)

Poser 5 is slow---period, especially utilizing FireFly Prod.

Shadows are the things that really bog the render down..plus the size of the pz3 of course...but try to reduce the shadpw map sizes...and turn shadows off on objects that it doesn't matter in the image.
for an experiment , render with shadows on, then try a render with them off...see what happens.

as far as your system...yes, if you are ready and can afford an upgrade, I'd go for it. My system is currently AMD64 3200+ with 1gig ram...its really decent, but 2 gig ram would be ideal....I upgraded from a similar system..1.8ghz and 512meg ram..there is more of a difference in virtual memory useage...the render speed did improve, but not as much as I would have thought...but the hard drive churning is gone. IS there a good benchmark pz3 floating around ???? and a list of system speeds ????

Message edited on: 02/12/2005 07:24

Well I think that the RAM has much more importance than CPU speed for 3d renders in general (and poser surely is no exception!). The problem is that I checked at my local store (I live in Italy) and 1 Gb of RAM cost 350 euros!!!

Someone did post a benchmark pz3 into the freestuff here, I forget who it was (I'm getting old & the brain is going) & there's a thread somewhere here on the poser forum with details to go with it.

If your computer is using lots of swap space during rendering, try a lower bucket size in the rendering settings - 16 or 8 could make it a lot better already.

Hi gang, I really think that the CPU and BUS speeds are the main things. When I did a test rendering, I check my performance and also monitored my physical memory usage. My 2.0 GHZ CPU was flatlined at 100% while I still had around 100K of RAM left (I have 512K too). There is a way to increase rendering speed, but its not pretty. One is to purchase a coprocessor card ($3000)or use several computers linked in tandem with each other (the ILM Render Farm thing). In the former, the coprocessor takes all the graphics rendering load off the CPU. One can check the computer performance by doing a CNTRL-ALT-Del (once)and click on the performance tab-the graph and other data shows a lot-Plutom Plutom

Poser allow network rendering? interesting, didn't know that :)

Funny you should ask - I had 1gig of memory last week and P5 renders kept locking up. Now I have 1.5gig of memory and I haven't had a prob since (P4 2.2Ghz) P5 does not seem to like using page files on the harddisk (at least my copy doesn't anyway)

I kept getting the "virtual memory" message which effectively locked up my P5. SVDL suggested upping my page file to 3Gig and that sorted it, no problems since and renders fine. I currently have a Pentium 4 1.8Ghz with memory of 512 RAM although I'm hoping to buy a new system tomorrow if my nerve holds!! [lol].

XP defrag doesn't do it, but Norton's does...puts the virtual cache at the start of the hard drive so it can be accessed quicker...that may be another helper

I have a P4 2.4Ghz with 1Gb of ram and it's slow on complex renders, but i have heard in many forums that Poser5 suffers with memory leaks,hopefully this is cured in Poser6, and i hope that my graphics card will be used in Poser6, as Poser5 does nothing to help renders at the moment, and thats one hell of a waste for my Nvidia 5950...