I've been thinking about buying the upgrade to Poser Pro from Poser 7 but what benefits are there?  How much different is Poser Pro?  Thanks.

i think you should whait until poser 8 comes out.

Is there any release date set for Poser 8?  I didn't even know they were making it.

Quote - I've been thinking about buying the upgrade to Poser Pro from Poser 7 but what benefits are there?  How much different is Poser Pro?  Thanks.

The major benefit I found was in rendering speeds (on 64 bit systems).

I used to run Poser 7 on a P4 HT 3.2 ghz with 2GB ram running windows XP 32 bit which was pretty nifty...

Now I am running Poser Pro on a Core 2 Quad 3.0 ghz with 8GB ram running Vista 64 bit and I would say it renders at almost twice the speed and can handle much more complex scenes.

Poser Pro has a few more bells and whistles over Poser 7, but I don't use them

I think you should do a search in this forum. This topic has been discussed over and over again. The last time was close to a week ago. Saves all of us a lot of time if you do so, since we don't have to reply to the same question each time it's being asked.

Thanks for the reply Ziggie.  I will probably buy it if works well with 64 Bit XP.  I don't like Vista too much since it's so unstable.  Windows 7 may work once they get all the bugs out of it as soon as it's released. 

Poser Pro works fine on XP64. FFRender64 can use more than 4 GB of RAM - and has done so on a regular basis with my scenes.
When more RAM is needed than is physically available, a lot of swapping occurs and the system will be slow as molasses, but the render finishes fine - after two days. Most renders don't take up all the RAM (if you have enough), and finish a lot faster.

Quad6600, 8 GB RAM, XP Pro 64 bit.

Poser Pro has some quirks, at least on my machine it does. My particular problem is the navigation of the library. I'm not even sure how to describe what goes on, but it many times will not have a navigation list. If I click on it, I'll get a message about "Build Folder Menu". If you click on that to make it build the folder menu, 9 times out of 10, it won't do it. My solution has been to go out of Poser Pro's Runtime, click on one of my other loaded Runtimes, wait for it to build a list there (usually very quickly), then click out of it and back into Poser Pro. That seems to force it to build a folder menu which I can then navigate. Maybe this is just a quirk of how it operates on my machine. But I have also not seen a change in render times as others have. The only reason I use it is for Gamma Correction.

Yes it sounds like I'm going to hold off until Poser 8 is released.  Whenever that will be.  There seems to be too many quirks.  Thanks for everyone's input.

Poser 7 does the exact same thing on my machine Latexluv so it's not a Poser Pro quirk..

Gee, I thought it was just me!

Two things can cause that.. one is really big Runtime Folder (that is why I always recommend multiple Runtimes) and the other may just be corrupted Preferences.

Poser Pro offers Queue Rendering, Background Rendering, support for 64 Bit OS with FireFly Render 64 (FFRender64) , Network Rendering just on the Rendering.

Gamma Correction is now available for Rendering.  You can use the HDRI export
A big one that is not mentioned often is the support for Normal Mapping
There are also Four new Poser Pro figures for use in games and such

You also have the Poser Fusion Plug Ins for Lightwave, 3DS, Maya, and C4D.

None of those apply to me Rat..I'm used to it now so i'll just live with it..

It should not be doing that.. I recommend you contact Support over at Smith Micro... if resetting Preferences did not fix it and you do not have a very large Runtime, it could be something else corrupted.