Hi onimusha,

Another thought worth considering, while you are waiting for Poser 7 (with built in multi-threaded and 64-bit memory support ---- I WISH!), is that Poser 6 can be used to pose a scene that you can then RENDER in something that is possibly faster on the new hardware - as long as you lay off the dynamics and the Poser 6 material shaders. I believe that some of the Vue line can support multiple CPUs (or multiple workstations) doing a render (I think they are called "Render cows"). Svdl would know much more about this as he is very skilled with Vue.

I tend to agree with the feeling that AMD X2s are probably the best performing processors at a reasonably affordable price point. You might want to check out the tech report and their benchmarking of various CPUs.

www.techreport.com
and browse to Articles => CPUs
Although they do not test Poser (alas), they do rendering tests with 3D Studio Max and POV-Ray. This can be really handy considering the huge range of CPU types, frequencies, bus speeds, numbers of cores, core revisions, etc.

For the user needing a cheap (actually FREE) alternate renderer option, there is POV-Ray. The latest (beta) version will run on 64-bit windows and will make use of dual cores to almost half the rendering times. Poser support comes from FlyerX's brilliant POSE-Ray tool. The latest incarnation of POSE-Ray is really quite easy to use and seems to get almost all of the textures and transparencies correct. I found that Poser 6 => POSE-Ray => POV-Ray was the only way I could get a few of my really large/complex scenes rendered, when Poser 6 just choked on the combined geometry and texture load of half a dozen millenium figures and a load of scenery and props.

The results from POV-Ray are not too bad either. Check following link if interested:

Example Pov-Ray render of P6 scene