Quote - 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.  ...
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.....

 

When I add textures and clothes the image looks white like a ghost.  Daz studio gives me a better preview closer to what I will see on the actual render than poser does.   Will this change if I get a better video card?

I too have some lag between my mouse movements and what happens on screen.  I run at 1024x768. 32 bit colors 

All in all I would mainly like to improve the performance of the pre-render work.  That seems like its all driven by video card and hard drive.  The harddrives you can't do that much about (you can go scssi but that doesn't buy that much more for the price) but the video cards you can right?   
 Like you say I don't stare at the screen while waiting for a render - especially if its an animation, So the pre render performance is as important if not more so.

Am I right to say the pre render performance has little to do with the cpu (with in reason I'm not saying to put somethign less than a pentium 3 in or anything) and is mainly based on video card?