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