Does anyone know how much a 3D video card will impact Poser’s performance?  I’ve always used the software on laptops, so high powered video cards were not an option.  However I’m looking at a setup with a NVIDIA GeForce 8600GT 512MB DDR3 PCI Express card.  My new laptop does have discrete graphics, and I defiantly feel a difference.  But it is also significantly faster with more RAM.  So that may be more responsible than the video card.  Poser will not be the primary tool I use on this new desktop system, but I’d still like to know if I’ll see any benefit if I move my install of Poser over.

Not a thing.  Poser uses the video card for preview only.

With a good videocard and openGL correctly setup, very fast "preview-animations" are possible. My preview window mostly looks better than some final renders in certain galleries :)

Here is a hardcopy of my actual Poser screen.

Nudity at adp001's link, folks, for those of you who might be at work and would like to stay employed. :) What is your video card, out of interest?

Sorry for not setting the nudity tag (europeans don't see mother nature as something that should be hidden ;) )

This screenshot was made on a machine with a GeForce 8600 GT with 256MB RAM.

So adp001, can you turn on any additional lighting, shaders, shadows, raytracing, etc with a video card?  I know that’s the kind of thing these cards do, but I wasn’t sure if poser was setup to actually use those features. 

I have used ATI 256mg ddr2 and NVIDA 256 mg ddr3 and NVIDA 128 mg and can go upto 512mg from memory ddr 2 and have had no problems with render in poser 4,5,6,7.

Poser is only able to handle OpenGL - not your video card. What you can enable-/disable from within Poser is limited (see render -dialog -> preview).

Set various features with your OpenGL setup dialog (part of your video drivers) and watch if Poser can handle it (probably you have to restart Poser after changing  OpenGL options).

Wow, i had no idea those preview options were there.  Awsome.  Even my laptop can handle the hardware shading, but the shadows do seem a bit over done when i zoom out.  Do you know of any way to tweak this.  They are a lot darker than when i render.  I'm using both depthmap shadows and ambient occlusion.

OpenGL can handle max 8 lights. Look how mutch your videocard can. With laptops, often memory is shared. Is enough (video)memory available for Poser? Depending on your videochip you better disable hardware shading, especially for complex scenes. But maybe you want to raise "Preview Texture Resolution" to a higher value (I'm using 1024MB). With this setting you are able to count pores in your preview window ;)

This is a bleeding edge laptop.  I got it last September, but it has kept up with the pack because I overloaded it at the time.  I've got 4 gigs of RAM (though I’m running 32 bit, so you know the story with that), with a Core 2 Duo 2.4 Ghz T7700.  The video card is an NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GS.  Supposedly it is fully discrete and not relying on system memory.

I don’t really notice any performance difference when I’ve got hardware shading turned on.  I can fly around the scene with my 3DConnexion mouse just as quickly and smoothly as I can without it turned on.  But admittedly, I only have about 1 figure, several cloth items, and some strand based hair loaded.  But it is a butt-load of hair.  Once I add more figures I might have more trouble.  But anyway, the shadow “problems” don’t really seem like a memory issue.  Maybe I should pay a visit to the openGL settings as you suggested.  Another thing is that changing the shadow settings on my lights in poser makes not apparent difference in the preview window. 

Poser doesn't handle OpenGL perfect :) But allways better than only a software preview.

Maybe the used driver may be the problem. Or another program that is using OpenGL (I own a program, once started, Poser isn't able to use OpenGL until I reboot).

Lol, I love poser, vista, and all other software created exclusively to test the sanity of users.  Anyway, I’m ecstatic about the ability to view shaders in preview (and change the texture size as well).  I feel like a bonehead for not knowing that was in there, but either way it’s a plus.  And, until I got the new laptop it probably would have crushed my system to turn any of it on anyway.  If I figure out the shadow problem I’ll post about it here for others.  But like I said, I’m just glad I don’t have to render everything I tweak a shader now!  I’ll also post my thoughts on how the new desktop system compares to the laptop if I do go that route.  It is looking less likely though because my main tool for work is SketchUp, and that looks even less likely to take advantage of a fast card.

The only thing that I've notice with videos cards is the ability of the card to show more colors. But this is only half of the story since the monitor also makes a difference.  I work on poser from two different computers and the poser with the better video card is able to show more color range. Other than that poser just sucks up alot of RAM

@FightingWolf: Which Poser version are you using?**

**We are talking about Poser 7 and OpenGL-Support, escpecially for Nvidia Cards. 
Poser version below 7 do not support OpenGL. But D|S does.

Poser 6 can use OpenGL previews too, although I don't know if the implementation is improved in P7.

Yes, Poser 7 does a lot more with OpenGL than P6 does. Some 100% improvement here :)

I use both poser 6 and poser 7.  Poser 6 actually renders faster for me than the poser 7