Of course, I wasn't implying that the owners of Poser are lying about what its requirements are.  If you want to do big things in any application, you'll have to have the computer to back it up.

When I was doing a martial arts DVD series, can you imagine what was required to take footage into a computer and NLA edit it and author DVDs?  I needed a 300GB internal drive just for the imported raw video, a 250GB external drive just to store the good parts (clips) and other minutia of the process.  Without something like Premiere Pro, no amount of memory would have sufficed with just a 32-bit system.  This was on a Dual Xeon with 4GB of memory, nearly 1TB of disk drives, a good USB2/FireWire video capture card, decently fast DVD-/+R/RW drive, etc.  A few years back, this was a nearly-professional-level setup.

As with any software, they don't measure every possible combination of data and then limit all of them accordingly so that you can't do certain things so as to remain with the system requirements.  This is sometimes done when the limits are rather strict due to hardware or other limitations.  Poser doesn't say, 'wait, you can't load two of those figures' for everybody (only when it runs out of memory).  Some people can load two figures, some can't.  If you want to load two or twenty or two thousand figures, you'd better have the goods to back it up.  With anything less than 2GB of memory, the virtual memory can provide the avenue to simulating that much (but very slowly).  Once you go beyond that, VM can't help ya.

The reason there is this sway for better and better computers is that data is getting bigger (to allow for more resolution and just higher quality).  Granted, alot of this data expansion is also glut - see M$ Windows for the perfect example.  But we went from horrid quality VHS (worse than SDTV) to DVD (as good as SDTV) to HDDVD and Blu-Ray DVD (HDTV quality).  The digital data quality keeps ramping up - and this can only be supported by digital computers fast and ~big~ enough to do it.

Not complaining - just explaining myself. :)

C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot. C++ makes it harder, but when you do, you blow your whole leg off.

 -- Bjarne Stroustrup

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