Out of curiousity, since there have been so many hardware questions lately, I figured I would go straight to the source for some info. If you are at all interested in upgrading your hardware to help Poser perform better, read on. I removed the names to protect the innocent ;-)

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On Wed, 29 Jun 2005 17:45:48 -0700, [I] wrote:

I do have a curiousity question you may be able to answer for me though. There are quite a number of posts I answer on Renderosity almost daily now regarding Poser's use of memory and the swap file. My theory is this, the total RAM on the system is not very important to Poser. I think Poser makes strong use of the swap file. If this is the case, would it make sense for people to get faster hard drives (for example, 7500 or even 10,000 RPM?) Also, I had a theory that it would make more sense for someone who is thinking about getting a 64bit CPU, instead going with a dual-CPU system. The way I figure it, two slower CPUs, with their distinct pipelines would be faster than one high-powered CPU. Lastly, quite a number of people feel they need newer video cards. I have seen others say that it doesn't make sense to get a newer card, since it doesn't really affect rendering. My thought on that is that it should only affect Preview Mode, and only if the card supports OpenGL. Do you have any opinions on this? Is there maybe something official that EF could tell the community that would help us all upgrade our systems to do better work? This would be really great if you could provide it. I know it would make a lot of people very happy.

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In response from e-Frontier:

In answer to your questions regarding Poser 6's performance on various types of hardware, well, I could go on at length ;-) but I'll be as concise as I can while still providing useful data-

1. The video card you use generally won't have a major impact on your renders unless those renders consist mostly of preview-rendered animations. Firefly, the Sketch render engine and the Poser 4 engine all render entirely in software and make no use of the GPU whatsoever, so spending money on a high-end video card is wasteful for probably 75% of the work that people do. That being said, if your work consists mostly of animations for which an OpenGL preview render is adequate, then a high-performance video card may be a good investment; a tenth of a second's decrease in render time per frame can add up over the course of several 900-1200 frame animations, and the longer the sequence, the more time you'll save with a faster card. But this is only in that one particular case; for stills, sketches, toon renders or photorealistic video, the graphics card is basically irrelevant.

2. Typically there won't be a major speed difference between using a single-processor hyperthreaded machine and a (slightly slower) dual-processor system; a lot depends on the bus speed, the RAM speed and (as you noted so accurately) the speed of the hard drive. Poser isn't multithreaded, but the OS can route other, non-Poser processes to one processor while allowing Poser to tie up the other in rendering; Poser itself gets a slight speed boost but you'll see the benefits most in other apps which won't be as badly impacted by Poser's heavy processor use when rendering. You probably won't see as much benefit from a 64-bit hyperthreaded machine of equivalent speed- but there's the rub: most hyperthreaded or 64-bit chips run at a faster clock speed than dual-processor systems, so the difference gets made up somewhat. We have never really sat down and done a "Firefly shootout" between a 64-bit machine, a dual-processor machine, and a standard single-32-bit-CPU machine, although it would be interesting to see the results.

3. As mentioned above, hard drive speed does have a significant impact on Poser's performance, especially if you're unlucky enough to require the use of virtual memory. In any case, it's total throughput speed, not just rotational speed, that makes the difference. You should also make sure that your hard drive has adequate space and is properly defragmented, of course, and the bus speed also makes a difference. Poser uses the main system swap partition for its own swapping, unlike Photoshop and some other applications that allow you to determine which drive to use.

I'll post this information in our Poser Knowledge Base, so it'll be available for all to see.

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I hope some of you find this information useful. I know I will!

Fits exactly with my experience. I've done some comparisons between my three workstations and my portable: disk speed is VERY important, and having the swapfile on another physical disk than the OS certainly helps. Disk speed consists of two aspects: access time and transfer speed. Access time is composed of seek time (cylinder to cylinder) and rotational delay. A high rotational speed means less rotational delay. It has no influence on seek time. A high rotational speed combined with a high number of sectors per track results in a high transfer rate. A properly defragmented hard drive results in a reduction of seek times, and a greater chance that "burst reads" are possible (reading a number of consecutive sectors, which is very fast). Hyperthreaded or not hyperthreaded doesn't make a significant difference in render speeds. Hyperthreading disabled resulted in a very slightly faster render on my P4 2.8 system. Hyperthreading enabled was beneficial for the other apps that ran simultaneously. As for 64bit vs 32bit: my Athlon64 3500+ performed about 20% faster than the Athon2700+ and P4 2.8, which indicates that 64bit doesn't speed up the renders, at least not significantly. Switching to WinXP 64bit had no influence on render times. Hope this info is useful to some of you out there.

Attached Link: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/platform/server/PAE/PAEmem.mspx

For those who don't know, on most modern computers, when all RAM is used, the computer will swap data to the hard drive and back to give the impression that there is more RAM. I think the key quote in e-Frontier post is "hard drive speed does have a significant impact on Poser's performance, especially if you're unlucky enough to require the use of virtual memory." Virtual memory is many times slower than "real" memory. Consider RAM speed is measured in 1/1,000,000,000 of a second and hard drives are measured in 1/1,000 of a seconds. Fast hard drive(s) will definitely make a PC perform faster, inside Poser and in Windows in general. A lack of RAM will definitely make your PC run slower, however adding RAM doesn't always make your PC faster. I think once you get much beyond 1GB of RAM, you'll get diminishing returns. According the Microsoft: "The maximum amount of memory that can be supported on Windows XP Professional .. is 4 GB. ... The virtual address space of processes and applications is still limited to 2 GB unless the /3GB switch is used in the Boot.ini file" (see link)

The /3GB switch itself is not enough. The app also has to be compiled for 3 GB memory use. Poser is not. Neither is Vue.

Good point, svdl.

Stupid question time....how do i find my swap file and whatss the best setting?

Assuming you're using Windows XP, you can find the swap file by right-clicking the My Computer icon, then Properties, tab to Advanced. Click the Settings button in the Performance frame. Then click the new Advanced tab again. Probably the settings are that Windows is managing the page file. That is not optimal. There's a bit of discussion regarding the best settings. A good rule of thumb is setting the minimum swap file (often called page file) to 150% of your physical memory, and maximum swap file size to about 300%. My personal preferences are to set minimum and maximum size equal at a high number, that will prevent disk fragmentation. I've seen reports that Poser is less stable with large swapfiles (larger than 2 GB), but I can't confirm those reports. Anyway, don't set it lower than 1 GB. And if you have multiple physical disks (not just multiple drive letters), it's a good idea to place the swapfile on the fastest disk in the system, preferably another physical disk than the OS disk.

thanks for that....i have xp....i have 765mb ram...and i have an internal hard drive which has the os on....and an external harddrive .....how would i move the swapfile over? if its still advisable to do it.

below is a ss of my swapfile....im a lil confused as i see nowhere to put a minimum setting...feeling a lil dumb now lol....what would u say would be best to set it at? i have win xp 2ghz, 768ram thanks guyz

I wouldn't advise to put the swap file on the external drive. Right now it's on your system drive, it'd better stay there. I'd recommend changing the initial size from 1152 to 1536, and leave maximum size as it is. Or you could set both initial size and maximum size to 2048. The latter option will take more hard disk space, but you still got 17 GB free, shouldn't be a problem. I always choose the second solution. Why? If Poser needs additional swap file space, it has a nasty tendency to crash, instead of just waiting for the OS to allocate the space. And allocating extra space beyond the initial size leads to fragmentation of your disk. While the extra swap file space will be released as soon as you reboot the system, other files will have fragmented due to this temporary disk allocation. My systems have more memory, (1 GB Athlon2700, 3Gb/3Gb swap file; 1.5 GB P4 2.8,3Gb/3Gb swap file, and 4 GB Athlon64, 6Gb/6Gb), so they also have larger swap files. One last rule: the swapfile should never be smaller than the physical memory size.

ty ever so much......i will have a ton of space soon as im gonna be burning stuff to dvd.....just a case of moving my ass into gear lol.....thanks again

I'll jump in here to ask a quickie. I'm waiting on delivery of a new machine, with 2Gb RAM and a SATA drive (OS = win 2k). I was planning to use my other HDD (7200 rpm, but not SATA) as the 2nd drive. Even if it's not SATA, would it be better to put the page file on the 2nd HDD? Or would the 1st one be faster? TIA mac

SATA vs ATA133 - it all depends. The bottleneck in disk performance does not have to be the connector. It's a new machine, with both ATA133 and SATA. Since it's new, both the ATA133 and SATA controllers will be integrated in the southbridge, they won't be connected over the PCI bus. The difference in speed will be solely drive speed differences, not bus speed differences. If your older HD is not very old (less than a year and a half), chances are that it will hardly be slower than the new drive. Depends on size (80 GB or larger means a faster drive) and seek time. One of my machines has two 80 GB Maxtor DiamondMax9 disks with 8 MB cache, they're two years old by now, and they still perform pretty well (midrange speed when compared to current drives). But those maxtors were about the fastest drives available at the time of purchase. Another couple of 80 GB drives, about the same age, is markedly slower (two WD Caviars). So, how old is the drive, and how fast was it when you bought it, those are the questions. Anyway, if the old drive is only a little slower than the new ATA drive, putting the page file on the old drive will still be advantageous.

Thanks for replying, sdvl. I got the old drive in february, 2004. It's a Maxtor 6Y060L0 80Gb (the new one's a 160Gb). Speed is/was 7200 rpm. So, if there's no marked difference in drive speed, it's still better to keep the page file away from the OS disk? mac

That's correct. What we're aiming at is separating swap file IO from other IO, so that they can occur in parallel. Where does the most I/O (aside from swap file) occur? That's program files, system files, the registry (on your system drive) and program data files. Keep those on the first drive, and use the rest of the second drive for backups. And partition those drives. When (not if) you have to reinstall the OS, you DON'T want to reinstall your complete Poser runtime. Make very, very sure Poser is not installed in the default C:Program Files, but on another partition. Same goes for every other app that has installable content in its own program directory (e.g. Vue, Bryce). This has nothing to do with drive speed. I'd recommend partitioning the first drive into 3 partitions: system, programs, data, and the second drive into 2 partitions: swap and backup.

I can tell you one thing for certain - moving my swap disk OFF my main drive (which is my windows drive, my games drive, and my application drive - partitioned into three partitions) and on to a ATA133 RAID 0 10,000 RPM drive has improved not just Poser response time, but render time also. I have lost a good 10minutes off rendering complicated things that were taking almost 40-50 minutes. So I'm holding off on the upgrade on my system like I had originally planned until I'm in a bitter frame of mind to upgrade again. The most important thing is - I can put a number of items into a poser 5 scene now and it doesn't kill the system by making the navigation very very slow. I noticed before that when I put more then 3 v2's into a scene it would get really slow when turning the dails, funny enough just moving the swap file and giving it a set size on the drive that does nothing while I'm doing poser stuff has improved the preformance of Poser a lot! So that is what I'm pretty much thinking is the problem - Poser 5 (at least) relys on Swap file a LOT MORE then claimed by e-frontier. I have one gig and it is still using the swap file even when not rendering if you have a complicated scene (and that is a boot up which has almost no background programs running). Thanks for the information though destro75 it helps a lot! :) WiNC

sdvl, All excellent advice, most of which I do already. I have 2 HDDs, both with 4 partitions. On the 1st drive, I keep C for windows only and a few odd things, like driver installations, AV, etc. I have a dummy Runtime on C, but that's only for final product checking. D is poser 4 and current projects only. E was poser 5, but I won't be reinstalling it, so P6 will go there. I don't use linked Runtimes either, to make sure my products can't get bad paths. The 2nd drive is swap and 3 backup-only partitions. I always do a clean install of the OS and all drivers and apps. And when I install poser, I chuck out practically everything that comes with it. My Runtime's less than a gig. Thanks again for the info. I'll definitely go with the swap on the 2nd HDD. mac

Some modern MoBos have integrated SATA RAID controllers. I just built a system utilizing this in a RAID 0 (Striped Array) setup. 2 Hitachi 160 GB SATA drives with a Intel 915PBL MoBO. The results were impressive. Poser loading times and every thing else showed noticeable improvement over a similar system running a single channel drive. Sorry I didn't take benchmarks and these systems are already out the door. So far I'm seeing the best performance from dual core chips. I'm sure this is because Poser can have 1 CPU all to it's self while the other core handles the business of running the OS. It will be interesting the see how the AMD dual core chips stack up to the Intel dual core chips. One extra note about the second hard drive and swap file. If your MoBo has 2 high speed ATA connectors put the Hard drives on separate channels. Slave drives are just that. They take a performance penalty as the Master drive gets to do it's stuff while the slave waits. It may even be worth while to put in a tertiary controller in a PCI slot. If your system is SATA this is moot because there are no secondary drives. The ultimate setup would be to add a RAID card and put in a Raid 0 or 5 array. For the nerds and curious, RAID = Redundant Array of Inexpensive Drives Raid 0 is 2 or more drives working in parallel. Part of each file is stored on each in "Stripes". Drive access is accelerated by the number of drives. Raid 0 provides no redundancy. If one drive fails the whole array fails. Raid 5 is 3 or more drives. It is similar to raid 0 except there is redundancy. Each drive stores enough extra data that the failure of one drive will not break the array. Once again more drive make more speed. The speed of any drive array will eventually be limited by the speed of the system bus. That is currently about the speed of 2-1/2 drives. Building a RAID array with 6 drives will be no faster than a 3 drive array. Currently most system builders are over looking the potential of multiple drive architecture. We are running dual channel ram, dual core processors with dual GPU's. Why not Dual hard drives? I suppose it's just a cost thing and perhaps a point that the consumers need to know about. Any thing that goes to the drive(s) will be twice as fast. Nerd3D

Man what a great read! firstly, bookmark. I could use some direct advice if anyone is willing, some of the terms are a little over my head but i think i get the jist of the advice here. Here's my system now: Single HyperThreaded P4 4 gigs RAM :( (i thought this would help) 1 10,000rpm Serial ATA HD 36gigs (my mobo will hold 1 more so RAID0) Two IDE big harddrives slower but big. Right now, my ATA Serial hardrive is my C drive, it holds my WinXP. Because the drive is small, i put my poser content on the D and E drive (IDEs) So for pure speed, (i like to use Max while Poser is rendering) I should add an exact duplicate of my new ATA Serial drive and set up a RAID 0 right? The drives brand new so i can always get another one. Also, should this RAID 0 hold my Poser runtime content vs the D&E drives? I don't mind waiting for content to load from the library initially, i just want to preview it really fast for animation and of course render faster. I would try the whole partition thing as advised above but not really sure how this works with the RAID. Any advice would be most appreciated, thanks for this thread! jtrue

There's a lot more to setting up a RAID system. You need to be sure the hardware supports it. If the MoBo doesn't say it does raid it doesn't. While NT based versions of windows can emulate it it is software based and not as fast. If the MoBo does not support it directly inexpensive RAID controllers can be had. Rocket RAID for High Point is one possibility. Once it's set up. I'd put the sawp file and Poser on the RAID partition. (And any thing that I wanted fast access to) Personally I keep my "archive" on a seperate box networked to the main rig. Nerd3D

Setting up the RAID is about the only part i do know how to do, i've done it on my linux server easy enough. I'm more curious about keeping Poser running as fast as possible.

Putting the swap file on the RAID partition (and keeping the swap file unfragmented) will probably do the most good. Second would be moving Poser and possiblly the runtimes into a RAID partition. The reason for adding the runtimes is to give Poser quicker access to textures and geometry files

On the systems that I've built lately I'm seeing the biggest Poser related performance gains comming form the drive array. That's what put me onto the RAID idea for a Poser box.

Nerd3D

Message edited on: 07/02/2005 02:10

ALso upgrading my system for better performance here, moving to at least 1GB of DDR400 dual channel memory (with a P4 3.0ghz CPU) the Mobo had 800Mhz FSB & SATA RAid onboard). I'm setting up a RAID 0 array (2 x 160GB 7200 drives). would I see a performance hit if everything is on the RAID drives (XP Pro, P^ & Swap, all on seperate partitions), or should I still use a 2nd SATA drive for just XP & a backup partition & put everything Poser related & swap file on the RAID for best speed?

RAID0 (almost) doubles transfer rates when reading or writing big files. RAID0 does not improve access times, so many small reads will not be accelerated over a single drive solution. I've done some tests a couple of months back, using a machine containing two WD Raptor 10,000 RPM drives and two Hitachi Deskstars 7200 RPM drives. Results: WD Raptors in Raid0, XP, Poser and swap on Raid0 array versus WD Raptors separate, XP on Disk0, Swap and Poser on Disk1: zilch. Loading, saving, rendering, the speed differences were negligible and fell within the margin of error. The 7200 RPM drives are configured as a RAID0 array. Haven't tried yet to run Poser from those drives yet.

Yeah but if you have the runtime and the partition on the same drive you will hit the same problem I have been - the drive has to jump back and forth between the swap file and the runtime. So ALWAYS have your swap file, and your runtime on DIFFERENT drives. This way you have the two different drives working at the same time, and not just one bouncing back and forth trying to read data all over the place.

bookmark swap file

One thing I forgot to ask. Does anyone have advice on the size of the partition for a swap file? I was told that's it's best to make the partition slightly bigger than the maximum swap file size. I've always done that (with no problems), but if anyone can think of a reason not to do it that way, I'm listening. mac

The swap file should be on an NTFS partition. It's usually best to make the partition about 50% bigger than the maximum swap file, NTFS slows down when there's less than about 1/3 free space.

Thanks for that info. Yep, I have all NTFS. cheers mac

To be honest from tests I have done so far you don't need a partition for just the swap file - It HAS to be on another drive then your primary OS and things like Apps and games, but as long as you have made a set swap file size (for example 3gig) and you have already defragged the drive you could put it on a partition on another drive which is already in use. However, I have found the best preformance so far in games like Doom3 and just general navigation when having Poser 5 open when I have: 1) Formated the parition 2) Put a set sized Swap file on that Partition first Also I have been using two drives now for my swap file - funny enough that does help. Basically what I have been reading is that Windows will use the drive that isn't doing anything at the time of the operation. So if you have a set size on one harddrive, and then the same set size on another harddrive then it will pick which one to used based on the speed. This isn't the best for my situation right now because the only drive I could test this on was an ATA-100. But it appeared to work. I tested by getting Poser 5 to do a render, while I was copying a large amount of files across my primary Raid-0 ATA-133 drive. I have lights on all my drives, and sure enough the ATA-100 (which is my secondary drive on my IDE channel) became active instead of my normal ATA-133. When I didn't have the ATA-133 drive doing anything, that was used. If there is anyone else that can confirm this - it would be good.