I have already published this question in Hardware/Technical but thought I would ask in a Poser related forum as well. If this is out of place, please feel free to move it to where it belongs for delete it if necessary with my apologies. I'm a Poser5&6/3DSMax6 user. I'm currently running Gigabyte GA-7N400 Pro2 with an AMD Athlon XP 2500+ Barton CPU (with clock limiting), 1G RAM and a GForce FX 5200 w/256M video card. Running Poser 6 SP1 most everything works fine. I do notice some odd issues where when you select an object, the title in the Dial dialog doesn't always change. This seems new to P6 since I never saw this in P5 SP4. But other than a few minor oddities, it seems to be running as expected. My questions has to do with rendering speeds. Note that editing, zooming, rotating and the like are snappy and quick. I'm happy with how that works. But when render time comes, it can really seem to crawl. P5 was slow too for me so I don't think it's so much a P6 problem. I realize rendering is all about CPU speed. I was considering upgrading, (....AGAIN), but wanting to upgrade in the right direction. I've always run AMD and have been happy. But that may be because I don't know what I'm missing. Here is what I want to gain in my upgrade.... 1. Faster final rendering. 2. Be able to render with hair, background and textures without failure. I've had lots of time where if I render a closeup of V3's head without hair, it renders without issue. But if I add hair, conforming hair, (non-dynamic), it may or may not fail. Is this a RAM issue? Could it really need more than a GIG? It just sounds like a lot of memory. 3. Better 3D artistry skills.... (Not sure hardware will help here, unless someone knows were I can connect to the MATRIX... hehehe) I've been trying to research CPU's between AMD & Intel. So a question would be would going to an Athlon64 3200+ really gain me any noticable increase? I mean if a render currently takes 12 minutes, would it drop to 5 minutes? Saving a minute or two doesn't seem worth the money. But if it could be cut in half, that'd be worth something to me. Espcially for animations. Looking at some charts from TomsHardware it showed Intel being faster at integer math and AMD being faster at MMX64 functions. Which of these two issues are important to rendering? I also do some gaming on this box when I get pissed at my ability for 3D artristy, or rather lack thereof, so it would be nice to have a speedy system for that as well. I guess, after all this rag chewing, I want to know if I should just settle for what I have because upgrading at what I can afford wouldn't make that big of a difference. Or would going from and AthlonXP 2500+ to an Athlon64 3200+ be worth the motherboard and CPU costs? TomsHardware did a test of 10 MB's and chose the MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum nForce4 Ultra S939 ATX PCI-E as one of the two best. So I'm looking at about $450 for a board, CPU and Fan. I can afford this, but what kind of increase do you think I would see? Would it double my thruput? Thanks in advance for your patience in reading all of this and for your responses. Nebula

In my experience, AMD beats Intel when it comes to Poser rendering. Since Poser isn't compiled with the long P4 pipelines in mind, a P3 architecture like AMDs tends to perform better. 3D Studio Max has P4 optimized DLLs, it may be that 3DS Max performs better on an Intel than on an AMD. Rendering usually uses floating point math. An Athlon64 certainly is faster than a P4. I've got an Athlon64 3500+, MSI K8N Neo 2 Platinum, 4 GB DDR400 Dual CHannel, and it's about 1.5 times as fast rendering as my AthlonXP2700+ /1 GB DDR 333, and that Athlon2700+ is just a fraction faster than my P4 2.8 HTT/1.5 GB DDR400 Dual Channel. So I'd recommend going Athlon64. A S939 mainboard also has the option to replace the CPU with a dual core Athlon64 when they are released, a simple BIOS upgrade will suffice. The size of the L2 cache seems to be quite important. An Athlon64 FX with 1 MB L2 cache outperforms an Athlon64 with 512 KB L2 cache, even if the latter is running at higher clock speeds. As far as I can see, going for an Athlon64 3200+ S939 is a good idea. Maybe even a lower speed, 3000+. Then you can upgrade to dual core without losing too much money (or you can wait, but I expect the first batch of dual core Athlon64's to be quite expensive. I'm going to wait for a couple of months after they're released before upgrading). Hope this helps, Steven.

When I start a render, within a 20 seconds or so, it begins to hammer the harddrive and hammers away thru the entire render. I have 1Gig installed. Is that not enough? I'm running Win2K SP4. Is there some process I need to go thru to tell the system to use the RAM instead of the swapfile?? Thanks again, Nebula

1 Gig isn't all that much nowadays. Depends on the complexity of the scene, the resolution of the textures, the render quality, but Poser easily consumes 1.5 Gig of RAM, virtual or otherwise. Assuming you use P5 or P6, it may be a good idea to change the virtual memory settings; increase the Minimum size to 1.5 times your physical RAM (at least). P4 can't cope very well with large amounts of memory, for P4 you'd better keep the Minimum and Maximum virtual memory size below 2 GB. The drive trashing you experience may have to do with Windows expanding the swapfile. Hence the tip of increasing minimum size.

Well, I am currently using Poser 6. If I set the swapfile to 4095 for both start and max, that should keep it from spending time expanding it. I can render a closeup of a face pretty easily. But when you add hair like Milly or Koz, it really shows the hit. I know this has to do with the texture files. I assume my system is hitting the harddrive because it has run out of the 1G of RAM. Is this correct? So if I were to add another Gig, that should also help. Is that also correct? Thanks again, Nebula

Correct on both counts. I've got 3 workstations, one witn 1 Gig, one with 1.5 Gig, one with 4 Gig. The 4 Gig station is definitely the easiest on the swapfile (and that swapfile resides on a WD Raptor 10,000 RPM, the fastest IDE disk available when I bought the machine). The 1 Gig system performs slightly better than the 1.5 Gig system, the reasons are: - it's an AthlonXP2700+, that's a better processor for Poser than a P4 2.8 HTT; - it has 2 Maxtor DiamondMax9 disks in a RAID0 array, those perform better than the single 160 GB Samsung in the P4. The big workstation has an Athlon64 3500+, which also is very nice for Poser work.