A couple of months ago, in December, I bought a comp I christened the Gigamonster, because it has a gig of ram and a Pentium 4 chip. It's a Sony Vaio with Gigapocket, whatever that is. I bought it because I was getting Vue 5, and I do cover commissions, which calls for images 1281 X 1945 pixels at 200 DPI. My previous graphics computer tends to gag and pass out. (I have tried to find out what graphics card it has, but unlike the other comp, it doesn't have something marked "Graphics Card.")

The kicker is, Vue 5 hates the graphics card and gives me insufficient memory messages before crashing. (How the heck can you have insufficient memory with 1 gig of ram and a 200 gig hard drive?) I was using M3, V3 and one of DM's sets -- not a huge thing.

P6 sometimes locks up on it too. It still does better than p5, which simply would not render in firefly even on the Gigamonster. If I enable shadows, it tends to gag a lot quicker.

I'm contemplating upgrading to two gig and switching out my graphics card. Do any of you have suggestions on either what graphics card to get, or changes I can make in my p6 scene to make it render without having fainting spells?

Also -- I hate to admit it, but Poser lighting intimidates the snot out of me. I know how to light stuff in Vue and Bryce -- Pick up light, position light, tinker with light -- but when I tried that with p4, the experience was so frustrating I just get lots of light sets and experiement. Does anybody know of any good lighting tuts?

You might want to take a look at these.

+ DG#008 Poser's Lights
+ DG#025 Spotlights
+ DG#059 Poser's Lighting
+ DG#060 Fine Tune Spotlights

cheers,
dr geep
;=]

Well first is first. Check your PC settings. If you have a gig of ram then you you should have 1.5 times that or 1536 for a page file. Right-click on My Computer and select properties. Click on advanced tab and then click on the settings button in the Performance section. Make sure Programs is selected in Processor Scheduling and Memory Usage. Check the paging file size and if it isn't around 1536 then click fthe change button and change it. As to a graphics card, it depends on how much you want to spend. I would recommend a card with 256MB of DDR2 or DDR3 memory. It'll cost north of 200 bucks though. As to P6, I don't have it yet but... You have shadow catcher now right? So, render your scene without any shadows first then do another render with shadows only. That should help. I'm sure much more knowledgable people here will give you more advice! E...

In Poser5 your graphics card is not the problem -- nor would upgrading it be a solution. (Poser 6 is a different matter) A complex set and two hi-res Daz models... you'd think 1Gig should be enough, but perhaps not, depending on how many lights, shadow mapping, etc. For you to learn how to optimize your scenes so you don't bum out on memory...there are a lot of past threads in this forum for you to absorb, and certainly people would be glad to respond to specific posts of images/setting that are giving you grief. ::::: Opera :::::

I can't even render 1 V3 with clothes on and dynamic hair in P5 without Firefly crapping out. I've got 3 gigs of RAM. Hence the Vue 5I purchase (which works fine). If the problem does end up being your video card, the nVidia cards generally work. (Try to find and old GeForce 4 Ti 4600 on ebay)

Vue seems to like nVidia cards better than ATI cards. At least, that's my experience. It may have to do with the quality of the OpenGL drivers. Sony often uses proprietary hardware in its machines. You can get good info on what's in the machine using Sisoft Sandra 2005 (a free tool, downloadable, only a few Mb. Just google it up). I wouldn't be surprised if the machine had some kind of onboard graphics chip. 1 GB RAM isn't really that much nowadays. Upgrading to 2 GB is definitely a good move. Vue will love it. And make sure you set your page file size fixed. If the OS needs to expand the pagefile when Poser is rendering, Poser dies horribly. I'd suggest setting minimum and maximum page file size to 3072 Mb or 4096 Mb. That is large, but that will make sure the OS will never need to expand the page file size. Rendering dynamic hair in P5 is a royal pain. I haven't tried P6 at high resolution yet.

Thanks! I'll give that a shot and see what happens. :)

I prefer the Radeon line of cards. I've never had any problems with them and I don't have that pesky "upgrade your video drivers" problem every time I install new software. The reason you can't find any video card in that computer is that straight out of the box set ups (like Compaq, Sony, etc) have video on board. The video card is attached to the mother board (is part of the mother board). Generally the video cards that are on board, are pretty bad and pathetic. Getting a new video card will help with some things but more RAM always helps too. Kristta

I have a Compaq which came with a Radeon X600 card in ready for P6 when it eventually arrives. I also have no end of s**t from the P5 firefly engine. It stops regularly at different places in the rendering process so I'm hoping P6 will be an improvement on that! I am also running a Pentium 4 3.4 GHz with 1 Gig or RAM and the Radeon has 256 Meg on it. thefixer Poser coordinator

And yes, it seems to have some kind of chip set for video. I hope I can install a card. The previous computer wouldn't allow it. :/ It's a 250 meg chip, supposedly. Doesn't seem to help. (I downloaded the Sisoft Sandra 2005 as suggested.) It also looks as if the stupid thing has 250 meg ram cards in the four slots, which means I'd have to buy four 500 gig ram cards to upgrade it. Which sucks. :/ I could take it up to 1.5 gig, but I'm not sure of the point.

You probably can disable the integrated graphics chip in the BIOS setup, you'd have to check the manual. Also check whether the system has either an AGP slot or a PCI Express 16x slot. If it has not, then you're stuck with the integrated graphics chip. Some business-oriented machines don't have an AGP or PCI-Express expansion slot. Warranty: most computer manufacturers don't have any problem with end users upgrading their machines themselves. Some do (IBM comes to mind). Check the warranty! Instead of four 512 Mb RAM modules you could also go for two 1 GB modules. The prices are comparable (2 x 1 GB is about as expensive as 4 x 512 MB). That way you have the option of expanding memory even further. Leave two of those 256 Mb modules in their slots, and you'll have 2.5 GB. Although applications never use more than 2 GB of memory (server applications excluded), still having more than 2 GB of physical RAM can be pretty useful. The OS itself takes up some RAM, other applications you're running at the same time take up RAM, and if you have 2.5 GB or more chances are that Poser will get a full 2 GB to play with. Hope this helps, Steven.

Thanks! Good suggestion. And I think I'll look into that.