Noticed something the other day working with poser. It does not keep image maps in memory , and use then when your render.

Case in point I took the one sided square prop, and in the material room applied a image map of the mona lisa to it. I then saved the prop, cleared out scene , and then reloaded the prop. Everything showed up ok ie preview.

 I then went into photoshop, and turned the picture of the mona lisa upside down, and saved it. Now when I rendered the one sided square prop, I expected mona  to show up right side up.

Well it did not. Poser went to the file mona.jpg on my hard drive, loaded the jpg which I had turned upside down, and saved, and then applied it to the one sided square, and then rendered it.

This of course slows down poser a lot if you have a lot of props, etc in your scene, and/or using a lot of textures that may or may not have high resolutions.

A solution to this problem is to set aside part of your onboard ram as a ramdisk, using available software, and putting a seperate runtime file in it. I've seen motherboards nowdays that can hold anywhere from 4 gigs on up of ram. So setting aside 1 gig of memory would not cause much of a problem.

This would greatly decrease the load times for props, etc, and any textures mapped to them. I've tryed it out with my system with a couple of props that were high in polygon count, and textures with high resolution, and was surprised at how fast they loaded, and rendered.

I like that it doesn't keep it in memory (in some regards). When I am working on a texture I will render the same texture with small changes about 30 times a night (at least) and if I had to resave and laod a new texture each time I would go nuts and run out of space in a day.

That is one reason DAZ studio is useless for me as a development tool (since it does keep it in memory).

Thank you very much for this helpful info.

But could you elaborate a bit more on the following points:

"set aside part of your onboard ram as a ramdisk, using available software, and putting a seperate runtime file in it. "

Sorry I'm not good at computer, but I'd appreciate it if you could explain a bit more about how to accomplish the above steps.

Best!

as, same request from me here

i'd sure like to know any trick which can make my machine do Poser faster without crashing

A 'ramdisk' is a virtual volume (like C:) that uses physical memory instead of a more permanent storage media (floppy, harddisk, CD, DVD, USB stick, etc.).  The memory is allocated and set up just like a regular disk.  On the Amiga, this was a built in feature.  On other OSs, it requires software to create and manage (don't know about MacOSX).

The advantage is that RAM access is billions of times (alright, that's an exaggeration) faster than harddisk access.  Reads and writes are nearly instantaneous.

The disadvantage is that one cannot maintain a ramdisk between power ups/downs because memory modules only store data while there is a continuous refresh (i.e.: electric current).  'Firmware' works around this because it is not volatile memory but, just like those USB memory sticks, has EPROM or similar.  Your computer's BIOS is an EPROM memory which permanently stores the BIOS settings.  So, you'll need to recreate the ramdisk each time you power up.  The ramdisk software may or may not let you save the volume contents to disk inbetween.  Another disadvantage is that it uses memory.  Once you give it a 1GB ramdisk, that memory cannot be used by other applications.  Careful planning of the maximum ramdisk size is critical if you don't want to run out of memory for other apps.

Robert

Infinity10 that is not the same thing, a ram disk has to be set up to run.

I would like to know how to set it up as well, it is a great thing that I miss from the amiga.

infinity10, nope, that's Windows 'virtual memory' - a space on your hard disk (as it says) where memory pages are stored and retrieved so that you can use more memory than physically installed.

A ramdisk is actually in memory, but acts like a hard disk (in that you can store files in it).  Think of it like a floppy disc (old school there),  but without the disc or the drive ;) - it still needs to be 'mounted' just like when you insert a floppy into the drive.

Thanks for the lesson.  I have obviously no clue about RAM disks !
If it is going be too complicated for me to set up, I'd better not go messing about with my system. 
Not worth risking, for the sake of a faster Poser.

Well, here is a product that makes it relatively easy to set up a RAM disk:

Cenatek RamDisk

Not freeware, though. They want $50 for it. Freeware RamDisk software IS available, but it's not as easy to use as this product seems to be.

Ramdisks are kind of an old-fashioned concept. They used to be more widely used when hard disks were much slower. As the typical amount of RAM increased and hard drives got faster though, the conventional wisdom became that RAM disks were not worth the effort. Windows' virtual memory handling was "good enough" to effectively balance the speed of the hard disk and the RAM in most situations.

However, they still have their uses in certain situations, and this is probably one of those situations. In practice, you would set up the RAM disk as something like Drive E: (if C: is your hard drive and D: is your CD-ROM/DVD drive). As long as the software works, you can make changes to the RAM disk and have those changes saved to a special file on your hard disk at shutdown. This will add some time to your startup and shutdown procedure, as the entire contents of the RAM disk must be loaded from the hard disk into memory at startup, and then saved the other way at shut down. Also, if you lose power, you will lose any changes made to the RAM disk since you last "saved" it.

Sounds like a good idea overall, especially since Poser is known not to use memory above a certain amount. If you've got the RAM to throw at it it could speed up renders a bit.

A RAM disk is completely useless (if not contraproductive) here. Windows already keeps disk data buffered in RAM, so if you got enough RAM, it won't read from disk.

Sorry, Dizzi - Don't agree. Windows uses RAM for disk buffering, but it is transient. Windows doesn't store entire files in RAM for any significant length of time. When loading multiple textures and objects, it's highly unlikely that they will all be in the cache at the same time, especially since Windows only reserves a certain amount of the total RAM for the cache, and releases cache RAM on a fairly constant basis so that it is available for other tasks.

Besides, changes to the file require a re-read even if the data is cached. If you are working on tweaking a texture - re-loading it and then doing a test render after a few small edits - a RAM disk would save you a fair amount of time by reducing both the time spent saving from your graphics editor and loading the newly modified texture into Poser. In the many times I've used this workflow, I've never seen Windows "skip" the trip to the HD and complete the whole transit using cache RAM. My hard drive light always flashes and there is a delay while the files are saved and loaded.

Wouldn't it be easier to just use the "Keep textures loaded" option in Poser?  You can do the same for shadow maps as well.

Or would that not accomplish what you're tyring to do (I think it does, but I'd like to be sure)?

** ,**

Jimdoria, I hear what your saying but, what kind of speed are we talking about, a small improvement or something major?

I couldn't say. I haven't tested this in a working environment, so I can't quote figures. It would partially depend on the speed of your hard drive, and the speed improvements would be more dramatic with larger file sizes. If you are working with 1MB files, I'd think the difference would be barely noticable. If you are working with 20MB files, you'd probably notice a difference in the workflow I described. It wouldn't save you hours, though - probably just seconds or minutes.

Not all time is equal, though, even when you add it up. Sometimes those small, constant delays make a task feel more frustrating, even if they only amount to a small parcel of time in the end. The point would be smoothing out the perceived workflow rather than adding a few moments of extra productive time to your day.
:bored:

Personally, I wouldn't use this setup because I don't have the RAM to throw at it. And if I did have the RAM, I'd still be leery about using it unless I had an uninterruptable power supply (or was using a laptop, which is pretty much the same thing).  But if I had the RAM and the UPS, I'd certainly try it out (although I'd probably set up the RAM disk myself rather than buy the Cenatek prodcut because I'm funny that way - i.e. cheap.)

You don`t need a special power supply to use a ram disk, the amiga ram disk was on all the time and that just had a standard power supply, like the pc one except it is external.

If you had enough ram to use, it would speed up a lot of programs, not only poser.

I specifically like Poser to reload the textures>

Every texture change is imediately loaded and requires no extra input> Yes it had to be reloaded but that is no issue (as it happens very fast)

Xantor -

Absolutely true. You don't need an uninterruptable power supply to use a RAM disk. I just said I wouldn't use a RAM disk without one.

If your PC loses power for any reason, even a short "brownout" style sag in the current to your house, everything on the RAM disk is gone in an instant. In order for the contents of the RAM disk to be saved permanently, the PC must be shut down properly so the software that manages the RAM disk can write the contents to the hard disk.

If I'm sitting there working on a project for three hours and the lights suddenly go out, I want to be able to shut down smoothly and save everything I've been doing, not sit there in the dark banging my head on the keyboard. Hence, I would want that UPS.

Similarly, a hard computer crash that requires a reboot can wipe your RAM disk before you have a chance to save it to disk. These are rarer under XP than they used to be, but they still happen. No defense against this scenario, though.

Incidentally, the Cenatek company I link to above also makes a solid-state disk add-in card that uses memory chips as a super-fast hard disk. This device has an option for an external DC connection to keep it powered up in the event of a power failure or system power cycle.  It also uses its own RAM so your system's main RAM is not impacted. The price is a laugh, though - $1,600! I guess they are aiming at the high-end server market or something. Too bad - I'd bet at a saner price point (maybe 1/5th) they'd sell quite a few more of these.

Like the posts in this thread. I'm using ramdisk from qsoft, which speeds up stuff a lot.  I like to be able to do editing of a texture while it's in memory, ie ramdisk, then render out in poser, etc. Got kind of a slow system so it tends to get to be a pain in butt after awhile if I just do everything with hd. The ramdisk from qsoft is suppose to be able to set up a ram disk of like 64 gigs! Now I know that my whole poser runtime file is like 20 gigs, but unless I win the lottery I'm not buying a system that can hold that amount of memory, etc. Tho I'll be happy to accept donations of $100.00 or more. j/k.

Jimdoria, you don`t use a ram disk the same way as you use a harddisk, it is for temporary storage of data.