Forum: Poser - OFFICIAL


Subject: P6 has AREA RENDER!! A question...

Jackson opened this issue on Feb 16, 2005 ยท 25 posts


Mister_Gosh posted Thu, 17 February 2005 at 3:23 AM

For a core renderer, I don't imagine that advances in hardware and operating systems make a big difference. Rendering technology isn't helped by better graphics cards or a new filesystem or API sets like OpenGL or DirectX (though preview is clearly improved by them). Renderers pretty much come down to CPU speed, size and layout of memory cache, and speed and size of memory. Even if they never touched the rendering code again, they can expect to have Moore's law working for them (the principle that everything in computing roughly gets twice as good/fast/big/etc, every 18 months or so). More interesting is advances in the algorithms, since that's what you'd really want to change if you wanted to "modernize" the code base (as a metaphor, it doesn't matter how many stickers you slap on the side of your Honda...until you upgrade the internals, you're still going the same speed as everyone else). However, such a modernization of the renderer isn't actually necessary to improve user experience. Simply analyzing and optimizing the existing code and improving work flow by way of better UI would make a huge difference. A new renderer would mean new quirks, and as we've seen with Firefly v.s. the P4 renderer, sometimes new quirks block adoption (would Daz be able to sell so much stuff that doesn't use one feature of Poser 5 if everyone were 100% Firefly all the time?) This is all armchair quarterbacking, of course, and I can't possibly know the internal details of what they are choosing to change and what they are keeping the same and why. I can only speculate a bit.