Well, it depends on a lot of things e.g. what display mode you run Poser in and are comfortable with, what screen resolution you run, and how complex the scene is in Poser that you are trying to display.  I run in 1600x1200 in 24bit color (if I could reasonably work at a higher resolution I would!) and right off the bad I work machine pretty hard - what is visible in the viewport has to be calculated out by OpenGL (greatly assisted by your graphics card, if your card is so capable) in order to be displayed on the screen.  So, with an ordinary number of vertices on the screen (say one poser figure) you and I might not see too much difference in speed.  Particularly in wireframe mode or one of the less difficult preview modes.

On the other hand when you have a million vertices in the viewport (say three V3/M3 characters and hair and various props and clothes) and have shading/texturing on (the last button in preview options) to get a more accurate preview, your 32MB card likely can't show you more than one V3/M3 character with their full textures (does it?) and you're likely running in 800x600 with 16 bit color, so you're really not seeing the texture the way it will look when someone else in higher color resolution sees it.  Right now I really don't think there is a practical hardware limit for heavy numbers of polygons, the stuff is just a ton of mathematics and data pushing.

"Unpleasant" to me means trying to pan and move the camera or move a figure's limb when the screen is updating at less than maybe 10 frames per second; it's that scenerio where you scoot the mouse a little bit and the camera or limb spins around many hundreds of degrees before the screen updates.  

I think if you tried using a large screen (20 inch or larger) at very high resolution you might understand why people are willing to throw down a large chunk of money on graphics hardware, it's really a tremendous difference.

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