Feel a bit stupid after getting an AMD 2800+ rig, loaded P4 onto it and the silly thing poses at the same speed as my old Celeron 400Mhz. What kind of speed boost can I get from P6? Sure it can use OpenGL, but for posing V3, M3, etc...the modern figures, PLUS clothing, hair, etc. it means nothing unless I can get past this herky-jerky, alow as molasses response time. I have a very robust system, 1 gig of ram and the latest WinXP Pro, nVidia 6600 AGP 128 (like that makes a hill of beans with P4...pfft) If D|S was more stable, i'd use it, but P6 is on my shopping list -- So, what kind of improvement can I expect?

Can you be more specific in describing the type scene and how slow it is? For an AMD2800+ to perform on par with a Celeron 400 seems strange indeed, even stranger than Poser. What kind of performance change did you experience with your other applications, especially graphics heavy applications?

When I run Photoshop and InDesign on my AMD, they fly like no tommorrow. It's unreal how fast and silky they operate. But when it comes to Poser, it's a dog. Here's an example:Load up V3 (quick), Move her around with full tracking = just like on my Celeron 400. Select her face, and it takes 15 seconds for all the dials to show up. Move a parameter, and it takes another 5 seconds to display the change. Switch to box preview and it speeds up enough, but it's almost tittle for tattle same as my old Celly. I even setup a dual boot into win98se, just to see how much a diff it'd make (none) so...my guess is it's the Poser 4 software. AMD Sempron 2800+ (1.6Ghz) isn't a blistering choice, but it SHOULD be scads faster than the dumpster I replaced. For poser, it ain't. Everything else is blazing compared to the old Celly. Poser 4 renders are lightning quick, but the actual posing is pathetic.

Sorry (or happy) to report, I have a very satisfactory viewport and workspace experience with Poser6. Now, I do not use unimess. Will not touch it. But I do use James Hi-Res with strand hair and Miki with strand hair and then thrown in a simple set. Sometimes they even have clothes on! With the strand hair, I have "show in window" unchecked, so that reduces overhead, granted. When I move the camera, instant response. When I slide the animation scrubber WITH TEXTURE SHADING and "full", very very very snappy. When I change body parts, yes, I wish that were faster for the dials to change to the chosen model/group, but it's not "many seconds", it's 1-3 seconds. What can I say? It's great! I just did a trial of Carrara, and while moving objects around and cameras and lights was snappy over there, sliding the animation scrubber was NOT. AMD 3500+ 4 GiG RAM Twin Raptors in RAID 0 array NVidia GeForce 5600, 256 MB on board Swap file always defragged and on different drive than OS. Windows XP Pro, all patches :::: Opera :::::

Hopefully someone will come along who has a clue but that sounds strange. I can't relate directly because I only have the default V3 SAE without all the head morphs but in general it sounds like I get better performance with a much older (1GHz Athlon), lower memory system. The lags you're getting just seem odd to me. Do you have the last P4 patch installed? Also, I didn't see a mention of how much memory you have. There is, I believe, A patch for P4 running on systems with (I think) 2GB+ memory. Other than that, I don't know, something just sounds funky.

I'm not sure, but I seem to remember that that P4 memory patch was needed to prevent P4 from crashing on systems with more than 512 MB RAM. Speed boost from P6? The program is heavier, more complex than P4, so you'd expect a slowdown. On the other hand, it's better equipped to make use of the power of your machine. Anyhow, P6 flies (until I have 8 Millenium 3 figures or so in the scene) on my Athlon64 rig (not unlike operaguy's).

"This memory handling updater will allow Poser 4.03 users who have greater than 1 GB of total memory (RAM + virtual memory = more than 1 GB) to run normally. Please use this to update Poser 4/Artist ONLY- Pro Pack users should download the Pro Pack Memory Updater."

surely the screen update is more to do with the graphics card than the procesor speed? jonthecelt

P6 isnt just about optimizations and improvements. in fact, using the firefly renderer in P5 and P6 will slow your renders down considerably. also, you will only be able to take advantage of the OpenGL viewport if you have a half-decent graphics card (with a low-end card like, say, a 128mb geforce 4000mx, the OpenGL viewport will be unusable due to transparency glitches). the openGL viewport only makes the actual workspace viewport slightly more responsive and 'clear', it does not offer any other benefits. your 6600 is more than adequate for the OpenGL viewport, and you shouldnt experience any problems with transparencies.

P5/P6 arent just about an OpenGL viewport: they are about a significantly improved rendering engine, dynamic cloth, complex shader support, support for specularity maps, sub-poly displacement maps, etc.
P4 is a dinosaur. its nearly a decade old for gods sake - dont be suprised if in the next year or two merchants stop supporting it entirely. i already have and nearly every veteran merchant ive broached the subject with is getting sick of supporting it.

its not so much about the hours of extra time it takes to convert something to P4 once its been made for P5/P6... nor the extra filesize that you are forcing all of your customers to download as well. its about the fact that right now, P4 is the primary factor responsible for holding back poser content development. there are so many things merchants could be doing with dynamic cloth, sub-poly displacement mapping, specularity mapping, etc yet they are still catering to a near-decade old program creating primitive .BUM maps and regular textures. most products in the marketplace are still conforming clothing with a simple texture/.BUM map. with the support available in P5/P6 clothing, skin textures, hair, etc could look so much better - yet to be 'safe' most merchants leave out such content to remain accessible to P4 users.

note that for using poser4 - the patches CL provides are very important, particularly their memory patch. i would also recommend that you take care to optimize your system:

1. i assume thats an athlon XP or sempron? socket A AMDs tend to run hot. download motherboard monitor and make sure your processor isnt overheating.

2. defrag. ideally you should use a 3rd party defrag tool like O&O defrag, which does a much better job and gives you more options, but even windows defrag is fine.
   make sure your pagefile is defragmented!!!! generally the only way to do this is to set your system to have no pagefile, clean up your harddrive, defrag it, then set a fixed pagefile on the drive you just defragmented.
   for 1 gig of ram you should have around a 1536mb pagefile. it should be on your fastest drive along with your OS. set the min/max numbers to the same so it is a fixed value and windows never resizes it. check in your defrag program -> analyze to see if your pagefile is in one continuous strip or if its fragmented. if you create the windows pagefile on an already fragmented drive it will almost always end up badly fragmented, and if you let windows manage it with a resizeable pagefile (1024-1536 megs, for example) then it will always be fragmented as well.

3. there are many windows XP performance tweaks that can help. luckily you are running windows XP - since win2k/winXP is the single most important performance upgrade any poser user could make. its more important than RAM or processor.
   there are also several winXP tweaking utilities - some better than others - that make performance tweaking winXP a lot more user friendly and accessible.
   at the minimum you should download TuneXP, which has some quick tweaks as well as access to system tools, and exctrlst_setup.exe - which is a microsoft utility that lets you turn off performance counters. XP automatically polls performance for around 30 different things (like terminal services, disk performance, etc) - 29 of which the average user doesnt give a rats ass about. disable polling for these to save some some resources.
   do a google search for tuneXP and exctrlst_setup.exe and youll find links for these. id also recommend going through your windows services and disabling anything unneccessary or that proves to be a security risk. there are many sites like this online that tell you what each service does and makes recommendations on wether or not you should disable it. disabling services like windows themes makes a noticeable impact in windows responsiveness and how much free RAM you have available (even on my system, an X2 3800 clocked past FX-60 speeds and 2 gigs of RAM, i can tell the difference in windows responsiveness with certain services disabled).

cheers,
-gabriel

btw - once you install motherboard monitor, id be interested to hear what your processor idle/load temps are. your athlon should vastly outperform a 400mhz celeron, and i suspect the problem could be cooling-related. did you build the machine yourself or buy it preassembled?

Message edited on: 03/18/2006 11:41

Message edited on: 03/18/2006 11:44

I used the built-in Windows XP-Pro defragg last night and it completely rebuilt my page file (swap file) to a contiguous 4GB segment.

" I used the built-in Windows XP-Pro defragg last night and it completely rebuilt my page file (swap file) to a contiguous 4GB segment." wierd, never does it for me. then again i dont run into this much as its generally the first thing i do after i install windows: i uninstall unneccessary windows components, disable the pagefile, rearrange all of the windows files in order that they are loaded at boot to optimize booting, then create a pagefile with a locked size. then install antivirus, disable services, and so on. either way you should have a locked pagefile, since if windows is continually altering the size it is bound to get fragmented. its usually not the end of the world but ive seen BADLY fragmented pagefiles - with over a dozen pieces scattered all over the drive, heh.

Attached Link: http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/PageDefrag.htmlhttp://

You can run PageDefrag from SysInternals to defrag the pageing file. According to them, normal defrag doesn't do it. Is Poser 6's OpenGL broken? I have an old MX with only 32MB and OpenGL works fine in Daz Studio and every other OpenGL application I have. I think it must be paging, some background app that Poser heat or doesn't like or something. My old Athlon runs as hot as a toaster but I have a CPU cooler that cost about as much as the case and it runs fine. yeah, Poser will be sluggish if I'm browsing, downloading, listening to a mp3 and running AntiVir, ZoneAlarm, MS Antispyware, SQL Server Agent, and a couple of other tray utilities, but with only 384MB of RAM, it's a wonder it runs at all in that situation. Normally, it's peppy enough for me. Your system should be like buttah.

i am waiting for the OP to post his CPU temps.. i suspect at the heart of this there may be a cooling issue. "Is Poser 6's OpenGL broken? I have an old MX with only 32MB and OpenGL works fine in Daz Studio and every other OpenGL application I have." on some lower end cards it doesnt display properly. for example my rendering machine has a 128mb geforce 4000mx, which i thought would be more than adequate as a cheap desktop card. turns out that when you load a transparency in poser and have opengl workspace enabled it will not display properly. ill take a couple of screenshots and show you, hang on...

ok, here goes. Sree3D is the software viewport. OpenGL is the new hardware accelerated viewport. this is on a 128mb Geforce4000mx.

note that while the transparency issue doesnt appear on a geforce 6600gt, overall the software viewport still looks significantly better. however viewport responsiveness is marginally better in the OpenGL viewport.

again, dont get poser6 for the openGL viewport. get it for the dynamic cloth, advanced shaders, firefly renderer, etc.

cheers,
-gabriel note: when you hit render -> antialias document, the openGL viewport gets worse. for some reason there are teal-colored blotches that appear on the transmapped lingerie. so on that card ive gone back to using software mode.