A little background.  I've got P6 running on a fast P4 laptop.  It runs most things with speed to spare but poser always seemed to lag.  In order to run it i have to turn off hardware acceleration because my graphics card makes the program crash... something to do with the preview rendering. My question is, I downloaded DAZ studio yesterday and was SHOCKED by how fast I can pose characters. Even on my first try I was able to setup a scene in no time. The changes I made to each model appeared on the screen instantly instead of the usual slow grind I experience with P6. My question is, does everyone else have this kind of speed problem? Or because my vid card is incompatible with P6 am I playing with half a deck so to speak? I'm not sure how to quantify the speed difference but it is substantial. With D|S it is like I'm working with a real-world model, with P6 it is slow, jerky, and frustrating. I'm not ready to sacrifice the functionality of P6 but man... the speed is night and day. Does it sound like I would get the same speed on P6 with a compatible vid card?

I have no P6 speed issues with my GeForce Ti4600 running duel screen. So yes I'd say it sounds like another look at your Poser/hardware settings may be helpful.

Sadly EF tech support said it was up to my card maker to fix... nothing they can offer other than turning off hardware acceleration.  But my card hasn't been updated since the machine shipped, and I doudt that will change.  But to you does it sound like I should be seeing speeds between the two packages that is about the same when moving models around the scene?

Your laptop most likely has a weak graphics chip in it.... most likely an intel graphics chip or a weak varient of an ATI or Nvidia graphics chip....

You could try updating your display drivers and see if that makes a difference.... but if its an intel graphics chip, theres nothing you can do to make poser 6 preview run smooth.....

I have a geforce 7800GT in my comp and with openGL enabled for the preview accelleration it runs smooth as silk, even with complex scenes with many 3d figures, and full tracking mode enabled ! :biggrin:

The difference in hardware acceleration vs software only is astounding. I can have Poser on two displays,  one with an almost-fullscreen-size preview window, and the other screen with the props menus and so on, with full textured realtime previews, and it just works great. I shudder at the thought of trying to do that using software preview!
So yes, look around for updates to your graphic card, etc.
You could also try the opengl wrapper made by scitech, it converts OpenGL signals into directx transparently.

manoloz... good call on the wrapper.  I didn't know anything like that existed.  It may be my wishful thinking but it does seem to move a little quicker now.... still nowhere near as good as D|S though.  I guess I'll have to do a lot more looking around next time a buy a computer.  There is no way I can swap out the graphics card in this one since its a laptop.  I'd be better off buying a new one from what I understand.  It is a bummer though to know that i'm missing out on a lot of speed in an already slow program.

Actually, the things I like most of Poser are the cloth , hair and material room. Those really do not make a toll on the graphics card, but on the cpu. Once you try dynamic clothing in a fast machine, you will seldom want to return to conformed clothing, transmapped hair, or poser4-like materials!

Anyway, I am glad the wrapper was able to speed up your Poser experience, if only a little bit.

That's interesting, I have poser 6 and DAZ, and I find that it is DAZ which is much slower most of the time.  DAZ can be faster because you can edit multiple body parts or materials at once.  But moving the around the camera is very slow for me in DAZ.

However, rendering a scene in DAZ for me is about 5 times faster than poser.

Rendering speed in Poser depends on how you set up your scene. Poser6 defaults to render using the firefly rendering engine, which, while being very powerful (It is based on Renderman), it's power comes at the cost of speed, as it calculates lots of things that in some situations are not that necessary.
If you want speedier rendering speeds, you need to tweak firefly, or render with  the Poser4 engine.
Actually I do not use Daz Studio, but I do know for a fact that the poser4 engine is several times faster that firefly.
From what I have seen in the galleries, IMHO, for extreme realism, at least in Poser vs Daz Studio, from the results I have seen, Poser is the way to go.
But it really depends on the artist, and with what tools you feel confortable with, right?