"Good luck running any 3d proggie without 2 gigs of ram and a good chip, duo core preferred."

Depends on the application, what you want to do and how long you're willing to wait. When my  already outdated Athlon 2400+ died, I had to switch to an ancient, literally out of the trash Duron 1GHz with 768MB and an antique GeForce 2MX/32MB. Vue's interface is molasses slow but renders of single Poser figures with HDR are within my tolerance of no more than 30-45 minutes. When I tried C4D, the interface was smooth though the rendering time was somewhat slower. POVRay interface N/A, slow render. Kekrythea smooth interface mid to slow render unless using MLT which equals infinity. I use Poser 4 to set up scenes to render. I probably wouldn't even waste time trying to install Poser 8 on this setup.

I just play with this stuff for relaxation, which, being utterly talentless at it, is a good thing. You can enjoy 3D without mega-giga hardware,  you may have to have more modest ambitions or more patience - but heck I'm lazy, I haven't gotten around to installing my "modern" GeForce 6200. Spend whatever happiness requires and you can afford.

"Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance." - H. L. Mencken