Quote - I'm told that the only thing that effects the speed of your render is the processor speed... can anyone confirm this? The reason for asking is that I am going to buy a dual display video card and I have the option of getting a REALY good one. I don’t use my art computer for gaming so I don’t want to waste money with a no use up grade its just for Poser 5 and Photoshop 7.0.... any help is welcome even speculation!

 

It is true that the video card does not speed up the render. Its also true that only more recent versions of Poser have supported hardware acclerated OpenGL -- however, they do so quite well. The OpenGL view of SimonG2 is extremely good-- and its realtime!  As much of my work is rotoscoped (eg, using Poser to create source for "toon-type" material, the OpenGL view is often good enough for me, and its very, very fast.

Also, note that the video card is doing the drawing for Photoshop.  . . although its a 2D application, it does depend on the video card to write to the screen (this is a direct function call, not OpenGL or DirectX) Cheap cards tend to have poor 2D performance.

Long and the short of it: Good video cards are so inexpensive that it doesn't make sense to skimp here-- $75 is the difference between mediocre and pretty darn good.