I checked out the board but didn't find exactly what I was looking for. I have Poser 6 and it's working fine... however, I have a dual core processor and I'm looking for faster renders.

I INTENTIONALLY gave Poser 7 a year to work out all the kinks and now I'm thinking it may be worth buying now. I remember the onslaught of "Poser is unstable!!!" messages but... how is it now (with all the service releases)?? Should I upgrade?

Note: The only problem I habve in Poser 6 is when I render something I get the "out of memory" error and it tells me to reduce bucket size etc. which is total B.S (I have a dual core 3.0 ghz, 4 (four) gigs of RAM and a 512 graphics card) - when I render motions it runs at about 2 minutes per frame but that's not utilizing both processors... 

Question: Will I be sorry upgrading to Poser 7 even after all of the service releases)??

Thanks a bunch

Hi, with Poser 7, I can render larger files than before: for instance I just rendered a 306 mg pz3 file without it crashing, however, it is slower than Poser 6.  On the other hand I can now reduce the min bias of my depth mapped shadows to .1... much improving them to the point where they're almost as accurate as ray traced ones.  Poser 7 now loads real hdri files with great results and the fast scatter is beautiful and fast in rendering.  You can also do 'instances' of objects, ie, copy loaded objects directly and place them where you want.  I say 'instances' because Vue 6 seems to only import the first and original object, at least for me, which makes me think they might be treated that way.

I've read some have had problems installing P7 in Vista, however, I'm running P7 in Vista with no problems and my sys configuration is low tech....no fancy tweaks. I have a dual core, first generation and render Poser files as a separate process using two threads and all seems fine.

Hope this helps,
regards...

wait until poser 8. poser 6 is good enuff for now (unless yer using OS X).

I have 6 and 7 but I still use 6 for most of the time!

Poser 7 will give less OOMs. Two reasons: first, it can make use of more than 2 GB since it's compiled with the LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE switch. Which means that it can use up to 3 GB of address space under WinXP 32 bit (with the /3G switch in boot.ini) or 4 GB under XP 64 bit or Vista 64 bit. Second, it can render in a separate process, which doesn't have a complete user interface that takes up memory.
It has a few nice additional features compared to P6. First, the morph brush - now you can fix pokethru or make custom morphs without magnets in Poser itself. Second, HDRI lighting. Third, much better Python scripting support (though still not good enough - I'm still missing widgets like treeviews, listboxes, multiline edit boxes and so on for the dialog screens). And fourth, switching between runtimes is far easier in P7.

Poser 7 brings Sydney and Simon.   Sydney is only the second-best female Poser figure, after Miki 2, of course, and Simon doesn't rival Apollo, but they both merit a mention in the "Plus" column for Poser 7.   There is a decent amount of Poser content for Sydney (and her non-identical twin, G2 Jessi, who is a huge improvement on the original Jessi from Poser 6), although there is much less external material for Simon, who is, however, compatible with the Poser rooms (unlike, for instance, M3).

if you're running vista - i honestly wouldn't bother. poser 7 has given me fits nonstop ( and lately i can't even load character textures without it crashing now ) i use P6 rarely, but mostly i've switched to DS to do my rendering. Not the best substitution, as a really miss the mat room flexibility, but hey - at least i can get to the point of rendering.

*if you're running vista - i honestly wouldn't bother.

*That's odd, I am using Vista Ultimate 64 and Poser 6 and 7 run nicely on it! I have an issue with Vue6Inf but I'm not sure if it's a Vista problem or a Vue problem or a driver problem [tool tips don't show]. I'm thinking it's a Vue problem because other progs that use mouse over tool tips are showing!!

Poser 6 is better and stable as Poser 7

OK, thank you all.. I knew I could count on the community. I guess I was getting greedy with rendering speed, I rendered a 185 frame animation last night and it took about... 40 minutes(?) and looks d@mn good so I guess I should be happy and stop looking to cut the time in half. I'll stick with Poser 6 until further notice. ;-D Thanks again!