"Should I also consider upgrading my computer or bying a new one?

I have
Xeon Dual CPU 2.40 GHz
2 GB of RAM
ATI 9600 (Powered by Sapphire)"

Mattsblood,

Just some food for thought about upgrading (machine and poser).

1. Poser is NOT multithreaded, which means your second CPU does nothing for Poser, in fact, when using Poser only, the second CPU actually degrades performance (but not enough that you would actually notice it without running benchmarks). There is no mention about multitreading support in Poser 6, so you could increase your performance with a single CPU running at 3.4 GHz or more. But, I use Poser 5 a lot on a 2.2GHz Laptop and have no real complaints about V3 performance, so your performance issues may reside in conflicts in the default IRQ mapping (Windows likes to assign everything to 11, especially the IDE controller and the graphics card - then performance really stinks for 3D work). Of course, if you tend to use your computer for other things while Poser is rendering, or if you have other applications that support multithreading, then the second CPU is a real plus!!!!!

2)If you upgrade to Poser 6, upgrading your graphics card to a Pro level OGL card may help a great deal. Although gaming cards do support OGL, they only support a small subset of the hardware accelerated OGL commands. Pro level cards (even on the low end, which are about the same cost as high end gaming cards) have much better OGL suport (hardware), and are much more stable in Pro OGL applications. Of course, this also depends on how much of the OGL instruction set that CL has put into P6. It may not have a real "rich" OGL implementation, and a high end gamming card may perform as well as a Pro card.

Bottom line, it's hard to say just how much of a performance boost the OGL support in Poser will give at this point. More info would be needed from CL to even begin to speculate (OGL support doesn't always mean good OGL support). As for upgrading your machine, first I would try to find and fix anything that might be causing performance hits. If your still not satisfied with performance, and have the funds, hardware upgrades almost always improve application performance, but then users will always push the hardware to it's limits, and things slow down, then it's time to upgrade (never ending cycle).

Just my 2 cents.

Good Luck!

PS: I pre ordered, too good of a price to pass up given the inclusion of Shade LE (may not ever use, but will be nice to give it a good try out) and the improvements in the render engine.

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