Has anyone tried those combinations? My current setup is P4 3.2GHz cpu 3MB memory and ASUS P4P800-E Deluxe and XP (32-bit, but do have access to 64-bit as well as Vista (technet dvd subscription)).

I get a lot of lagging due to lots of folders (working on setting subfolders) and end up doing firefly renders overnight. (i wouldn't think plain ol' pin-ups would tax my system.)

I recently replaced my PC with a dual core AMD system with 4 gigs of PC4200 and dual 10,000 RPM hard drives. I saw a very slight increase in stability in P6's preview window and absolutely no difference in Firefly. From what's been said, Poser has a "choke point" where it simply won't use any more resources. There are a few tweaks here and there you can do, but honestly it's just picking gnat poop out of pepper. I'm sure somebody will be along with a more in depth explanation.
I know a lot of people here will avidly disagree with this, but instead of putting money into your system, you may want to consider a better rendering engine. Overnight? Damn! I have way too many deadlines to ever even consider using Poser to render again. Cinema 4D and Carrara 5 Pro aren't too expensive and they kick the hell out of Poser when it comes to rendering.
Just a thought...

This is issue is definitely smethig that should be on the Poser 7 wish list.  Free Poser from virtual memory, and let it use more RAM.
DPH

Amen bro (dphoadley, that is)!  With systems slowly being capable of 4, 8, 16, 10-zillion GB of memory, Poser's steadfastly archaic 1.2GB limit is slowly becoming ridiculous.  When 64-bit (and its astronomical addressing range) becomes the de-facto standard (in about three or four years), will they still be clinging to it?  Japanese are usually on the bleeding edge of technology - let's hope that e-F has a say in bringing Poser into the 21st century. :D

Quote - Amen bro (dphoadley, that is)!  With systems slowly being capable of 4, 8, 16, 10-zillion GB of memory, Poser's steadfastly archaic 1.2GB limit is slowly becoming ridiculous.  When 64-bit (and its astronomical addressing range) becomes the de-facto standard (in about three or four years), will they still be clinging to it?  Japanese are usually on the bleeding edge of technology - let's hope that e-F has a say in bringing Poser into the 21st century. :D

Yupper I agree with faster duo-cores, and later this year I believe the release of quad-core processors, faster memory, faster and larger HDs 64-bit to be the standard soon a 1.2 gig limit is plain nuts. I took hope that e-f looks beyond this and into the future.

Cheers,
Micheál

There's no 1.2 gig limit. It's really amazing how easily people jump on wrong information in a thread... Looks like a good thread to build up some new myths...

Quote - There's no 1.2 gig limit. It's really amazing how easily people jump on wrong information in a thread... Looks like a good thread to build up some new myths...

All I've noticed so far, is that Poser doesn't go over 1.7 gig even with 2 gig physical RAM and another gig of virtual memory.
I don't use any other applications that may need that much RAM, so I can't say if it's the same with other software.
But my understanding is, that it's not Poser but the 32 bit OS (XP Prof.) that doesn't assign more than x amount of RAM to any application.

Unless you ONLY use your computer for Poser, you could stick to 32bit XP. But then who knows what Poser7 will bring? I'ld go to a high spec computer everytime, they get obsolete so fast that if you are not up to date when you can afford it, you loose lots of competitive advantage

I do not know how much memory Poser can use, but since it is a 32-Bit software, there is no way it can use more than 2 GB Ram, due to adress limitations. This is true on 32-Bit and 64-Bit Windows. No matter how much RAM you have, no matter how big your virtual memory is, 2 GB is maximum for a single thread.

To use more RAM, the software has to be recompiled for 64-Bit. Such an application cannot longer be run with a 32-Bit system, so the market for it is pretty small up to now. Few people are running 64-Bit systems.

I do think Poser 7 could have a version which supports 64-Bit, if it sells good enough. But since the only advantage of 64-Bit systems is the ability to use more than 2 GB RAM  chances that 64-Bit will become standard are slim. We probably will have to wait and see.

At the moment I would not expect any real advantages from using 64-Bit Windows.

Oh, I agree.  Some of the memory limitation is OS related.  But of course I'm talking about going 64-bit if Poser wants to access more than 2GB (well, duh). ;)  In actuality, 32-bit gives 4GB address range (2^32 = ~4GB).  The problem is how the OS and hardware limit this.  But Poser does limit it further - I've heard 1.2 GB max and I've never seen it go above this myself (Dual processor w/4GB installed).  I've pushed 32-bit Cinema 4D up to about 2GB before it starts raising memory errors (and there are processes using about 1/2GB most of the time on this system).

bantha, well with applications routinely using 1-2GB and wanting more, that 'only' advantage is a very big one - especially for 3D graphics.  Um, the big studios use Linux because it is and has been 64-bit for some time.  They can use 8 or 32GB of memory and I'm quite certain that they put it to use.  Speed is important, but memory is more important (as a veteran computer user of 20+ years).

Over a year ago when i used to work at the 3D animation department at an art school, the class/lab computers were at dual Xeon 2GHz cpus, 1 GB memory, and Windows 2000. And had Maya, Lightwave, Houdini, 3DMax, Premiere, and After Effects installed and some students have had 2-3 programs running at the same time. Now, where I currently work, most users are using the office apps and going through the internet to industry specific sites. Lately, I've been doing research and building servers. And it's quite enlightning about the different OS's and memory limitiations. Like, wow, I can go over 4GB of memory? SWEET! Of course, gotta have the right OS. Had to rebuild 2 servers from Windows Server 2003 Standard to Windows Server 2003 Enterprise. Of course, still can't use the 64-bit version because the 64-bit version of the software application hasn't been planned yet  cough JDE cough

I guess it's prety much speculatiing on if the next software version will be 64-bit, etc.