Poser 6 has a lot of tools and tweaks for lighting, materials, clothing, hair, etc. The problem is, when I try to put all that power to use in a complex scene, I either get a memory error or the render just stops without any message. Yes, I can dumb down the settings, but what is the point of having the ability to create a complex image if you can't get it to render? I find the whole process quite frustrating. I know I can do composites and other post render tricks to create the image. But that calls for breaking the scene into parts, multiple renders, and sometimes mind-numbing composition problems.

I have a brand new system with 4GB of ram, an Athlon 64 4000+, blah, blah, blah, which is now running XP SP2. Since only 2GB of ram can be accessed under XP, I have been thinking of getting x64, which can address more ram. The question is, will Poser 6 be able to access that memory in order to increase its rendering power.

Which brings me to the subject of this post. Have any of you tried or are any of you using Windows x64 with P6? If so, has it made any difference in Poser's rendering ability? Thanks in advance for any input.

I am putting together an Athlon system (FX57 w/4 gig on an ASUS A8N32-SLI board) as I type this (drives are formatting right now). Against my better judgement, I have purchased XP64 (just couldn't wait for Vista but have another copy of XP Pro as a backup). So, I should know if it works soon! I'll post back here and let you know initial testing results. Edit: My benchmark will be to compare render times against a Pentium 4 3.0, 2 gig ram, and Asus P4C800E Deluxe Mobo.

Message edited on: 01/12/2006 12:41

Thanks for the quick reply. When I ordered my new system, I initially ordered it with x64. Then, when I started reading up on it, I found there were still a lot of driver issues that were unresolved. I opted to change to XP instead. That was about eight weeks ago, so it's possible many of those issues have been worked out. I'll be very interested to see what you find out through your comparison. I assume both the old and the new system will be using 2GB ram.

Yes, I'm using it with an Athlon 64 3500+, 2gb of ram on xp64. I've had no problems at all rendering from what I can remember. Just how complex are these scenes you're rendering?

Poser can't really use more memory on XP64, because it can still only address 2GByte with it's 32bit architecture. Hopefully a 64bit version of Poser will available one day. There is already a 64bit version of Cinema 4D on the market. Others will follow...

Understood. The test is really a two-parter: 1) Will P6 "behave" in XP64? 2) Intel vs AMD on Render times. I suspect that AMD will win! I just want to see by how much. Of course, the best way to do this would be using two systems which are more closely matched and both running XP64.

And just in case eFrontier is listening... If they would just link with /LARGEADDRESSAWARE and fix any internal heap limitations, they could use 3GB is WinXP and 3.8GB in Win64. I know they can't do it w/ P6 SR1, but I haven't tested SR2 yet. I'm just hoping they'll fix that in P7.

Hmm, I'd say doing just a recompile with /LARGEADDRESSAWARE would not justify a new version. I hope, I hope they will put it out as a service release. I tested P6 on XP64 trial. Works the same as under XP32. I reverted to XP32 since XP64 doesn't support as many codecs as XP32. I had no problem whatsoever getting my hardware to work. nVidia chipset and graphics, and an Athlon64 3500+. Most of the chipset features ran right out of the box, only the sound required a separate driver installation - which worked fine. XP64 recognized the 6800LE graphics card and installed an appropriate driver. P6 was neither slower nor faster under XP64. The maximum scene complexity before crapping out was also about the same on both OSes.

It's not the relink that will be the issue. Rather, I believe they have some 2GB limitations in their heap management, and to fix those, they might need to rewrite their heap code. That can be tricky, especially if you're using external libraries (Firefly?) that you will need to use the new heap. I've been involved in this kind of work before, so I know it's not impossible. It's just complex enough that as a developer, I would tell the marketing guys that it was too risky to do in a service pack.

Svdl's post sort of answers the question, really. If there is no render speed boost or ability to create and render really complex scenes with lots of characters, props, lighing effects, atmospherics, shaders, etc, etc, it doesn't seem that, for now, x64 would be worth the effort. Thanks to all of you for your thoughts on this. I love P6 until it comes to render time. Then, grrrrrrrrrrr! I also found another good thread about alternative render engines that also addressed the source of my frustration. Scamp

I've been having this problem since I upgraded to XP64, it wasn't so bad when I was using XP Pro but now I can barely render anything bar the most basic compositions. E Frontier tech support don't seem to be much into fixing anything regarding 64 bit machines, but maybe if more people told them of these problems they might think it worthwhile. Catlin

I had my new Athlon 64 X2 4600 box shipped with Windows x64; I've been running on it for over six months now with no problems. Since all of the components are from larger manufactuers, I haven't had any driver issues...I've found that on the whole, I haven't reallly noticed anything different from Windows XP (which, I suppose, is actually a good thing). Poser 6 behaves (as well as it ever does, I guess), but I think until they rewrite the program for 64 bits that there will be much of an advantage over running it on Windows XP.