I am wondering if anyone here has updated to the SR 1 for Poser 7? I recently did, and I can tell you, my poser experience has gotten WORSE instead of better.

First off, a nice clean install of Poser 7 was a beautiful thing. No memory leak, no errors while rendering that the application was out of memory, or couldn't allocate enough memory, or couldn't load the texture due to said memory leak. Firefly renders were a dream! Fast! UBER! Awesome even!

Enter the Dark Lord of Memory Leaks, Poser 7 SR 1. I figured it would fix a couple of the display bugs I had encountered, such as the OpenGL driver not being as fast as it should be, and the random crash here and there. Boy was I in for a surprise. Once that evil thing had been installed Poser was no longer Poser, but a HAL9000, constantly telling me it couldn't do this, or it couldn't render that due to a memory error.

No to be perfectly clear about my system. I built it myself, I have close to 12 years of computer hardware experience. I triple boot my system between Vista Buisness, Mac OS X 10.4.8, and Windows XP SP2. My specs are:

AMD64 3400+ (stock at 2.2Ghz)
2GB Corsair XMS Pro DDR400 (leds on top the ram) @ 400mhz
GeForce 8800GTS 640MB GDDR3 (stock clocked at 500mhz(GPU) and 1200mhz(memory))
SoundBlaster Audigy 2 ZS Gamer
200GB Maxtor Diamond Max 10 3GB Sata
120GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 Sata
60GB Western Digital ATA133
16X Dual Layer DVD+/-RW

All RAM checks out. CPU is fine, just added a 700w Modular PSU. Vid card is still good, and all hard disks check out. I should also mention that cooling is not a problem as my system rarely goes above 28C at full load. The beauty is in the front 120mm fan, the rear 120mm fan, the top 80mm fan, and two 80mms on the side. The 8800GTS barely goes above 45C at full load.

It seems like "E-Frontier" botched Poser again. I'll be reinstalling it to a nice clean slate, and trashing the SR 1 file. Thank god for DAZ Studio! Its saved my bacon for my projects over the last week.

Lemme know your experiences!

Blade

not certain, but was their intent with sr1 largely to re-install network checking?

My experience with SR1 has been almost completely positive:

• External binary morph targets scene-eating bugs mostly fixed, not quite perfect but never fatal so far
• Greatly improved memory management during very high rez, high option renders, in my experience much better than Poser 7 with no patch
• Texture crawl bug killed
• Many various cloth room bugs killed

The one thing that gives me trouble is Poser 7 will sometimes exit silently when rendering with Smooth Polygons enabled (mental note to mail a scene file like that to e frontier support).

I'll point out you have a VERY unusual system config (Mac OS + Vista on the same box?)  My Intel box has no problems like you're describing.

Each OS is on its on HD. I forgot to mention that Mac OS runs on a 120gb WD Passport drive. It took about a week of tinkering to get it to run on that.

For me, Poser 7 ran beautifully right out of the box. Poser 6 was the opposite. It took 3 service releases before the memory leak was even addressed, and even then it wasn't 100% fixed. I think e-frontier needs to deprive its code monkey's of bananas for a month thanks to this :)

In regards to software development I don't think the code writers can account for every computer and hardware configuration across the globe. I think they can only work within normal parameters, that is, the average user and the average computer and hardware configs. I remember reading once where beta testing is limited to average OS and hardware configs because that is what they are writing for. If a software company were to take in consideration every feasible config known to mankind a program would come out once every 20 years.

However, all the basics should be covered in an application as well for general use and I agree that EF has omitted some of this. But so has all the other major software giants like Cough micro Cough Shite..I mean choke Soft*

Quote - not certain, but was their intent with sr1 largely to re-install network checking?

  If that was the case .. most firewalls block that stuff anyways .. and if it didn't actually fix anything - whats the point?

My only problem with P7 SR1 has been a cloth-room glitch, but that may well have been present in the initial release.

Quote - not certain, but was their intent with sr1 largely to re-install network checking?

No.

And network checking was never removed in the first place, as far as I know.

I have my share of bye bye's and I know I have a very stable machine.

Funny thing.... I wonder if the MAC people are having the same experience. To me Poser has always looked like a badly code MAC to Windoz conversion.

If the MAC plateform is stable, then it may be that the original code is OK, just a bad port..... OR..... the variasion of hardware across a MAC plateform is not as wide as a PC.
So let us know...I might by me a MAC.

What strikes me as bizarre is how the memory leak continued through all of Poser 6's SR's. It was never caught, never addressed. It was non-existent for me in the "out of the box" installation, but reared its ugly head with the first SR for Poser 7. Someone apparently screwed up somewhere. I don't think it has to do with a system config, but how the program itself addresses memory and memory usage. I can open a scene in 3D Studio Max that has close to a million polys, and not get the same error. If it were a configuration problem, one would think that other 3D apps would get a lil bonky. Not so with my system. Its stable, unless I open up a 4gb HD Video file, then it slows down to a crawl.

Makes ya wonder.

Poser 6 runs alright here on my Mac... dunno ab't Poser 7 (still thinking over whether to bother or not there). OTOH, I can run a render in Poser, play a movie, then go play Quake all at the same time w/ no slowdowns (kinda helps that I have 2GB of RAM and two processors...) /P

Running P7 on a 2.16 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo iMac, with OS 10.4.9. Both P7 and P7 SR1: smooth as silk. I'm using an external firewire HD for my P4 runtime, which is the version from which I updated to 7: also a beautiful thing.

I have a feeling I'll be switching to an Intel based system. AMD has dropped the ball again on performance to $$ ratio once again.

Still, stock Poser 7 is better than SR1.

degerz, how is p7 sr1 working in regard to rendering things like SSS and HDRI? I checked yer gallery but didn't see anything. AFAICT, it's about 50/50 in regard to whether SR1 is gonna make things worse or not. IMVHO poser is a bad reason to switch, but some good reasons to switch to tiger or leopard are: lower cost far less exposure to exploits possibly stabler OS (not certain of this last one - haven't used leopard yet).

HDRI seems to work ok on my SR1 - the lights need tweaking normally 'cos they are far too bright (depending on the map you use)

I don't really use SSS in Poser because it looks a bit wierd (to me anyway)

just another data point on the huge graph of life :)

Quote - degerz, how is p7 sr1 working in regard to rendering things like SSS and HDRI?

I guess "degerz" would be me. HDRI renders without a problem although slightly slower than a standard-lit scene. Don't know if the "multi-core/multi-thread" feature was part of P6, but it you can literally see it working in P7. I'm not a fan of SSS in P7 but I think the problem is the app not my Mac. > Quote - AFAICT, it's about 50/50 in regard to whether SR1 is gonna make things worse or not.

Is this from experience or observational consensus?