I'm struggling to run Poser 8 on an ageing Pentium 4 machine with 4GB RAM. It works, but VERY slowly.

I hope to soon obtain an i7 Quad Core 64-bit machine with at least 6GB of RAM. And I'll be running the beta of Poser Pro 2010 as well as Poser 8. And I need to capture what I'm doing with Camtasia 6.

What kind of performance improvement should I expect?

Has anyone else made this degree of upgrade whilst using Poser 8?

All comments gratefully, etc.

Something must be wrong here.

I Run P8 a lot faster then P7 on a pentium 3Ghz, with 2GB Ram.

Windows 7 build 7100 with an ATI Redeon 512 MB Video Card.

Did you upgrade the video card drivers lately?
if P8 is "very" slowly, on 4GB RAM, something is certainly amiss..

I should qualify myself, really. The interface runs much more smoothly than P7 (apart from occaisional glitches with the Library menu). It's rendering that takes the time.

I have an ATI Radeon HD2600 AGP card, running on 32-bit Vista Business. I've got all the latest hotfix drivers from ATI. I've got a 3.0ghz Pentium 4.

I designed a christmas card, and rendered it fine with basic lighting for the draft, but when I tried to render it with IDL (AO nodes deleted, transparencies checked off in raytracing) I gave up after running it for 72 hours.

How aggressive are your render settings?  If you could provide an image of your FFrender, we can see where you may possibly be having problems.

Poser people should not be trying IDL for the first time on a finished work of art. IDL is too new and different than you're used to.

Practice with the ground and a ball.

Then with ground, a ball, and a wall.

Then add a cube and move things around. Work with one light at first.

Learn all the render settings - without understanding what they do, you can easily push a 5 minute render into a month, for no reason.

You have a starship now, not a lawn mower. Learn the controls.

Go into the 8-minute IDL challenge thread and look at my settings - see what I was able to render in 8 minutes or less on my crappy 3 year old laptop.

Wow! Bagginsbill! bow bow bow I'll certainly check out that thread.

I've been following Vince Bagna's tutorial on RuntimeDNA's site, and I have been using only one light. I'm playing with the Antonia figure, but being careful to delete ALL of the AO nodes. I don't think my settings are particularly aggressive, but I'll screencap them and post them later.

You mention removing AO nodes, which makes me wonder what version of Poser 8 you're using? Since SR2, the AO nodes are automatically ignored when using IDL, unless you turn them on explicitly with a new check box provided for that purpose.

If you think you need to remove them, I'm wondering if you're behind on versions. In which case, duh, yes it is slow. Each update to P8 was faster then the previous version.

Right, thanks! I'm on version 8.0.1.10434. I've received the automatic update notification for SR1 (I believe), but I haven't installed SR2! I'll check out SM and update.

There is now an SR2.1 ..   I don't know why it isn't SR3..

Duly downloaded and installing even now. I didn't get the automatic notification via the Poser startup, however. And I seem to have overlooked the notification email from Smith Micro.

Smith Micro Do not notify for about two weeks after We find out here on Rendo..!

Ask them why..

SR2.1 is now installed, I've rendered the same image with the same settings, including transparencies in raytracing, and all is significantly faster now.

But still, I come back to my original question- can I expect even better performance from Poser 8 on an i7-based system?

Yes. If you compare the proportional improvement of P8 over P7 for a 3-year old dual-core system with 2GB RAM versus a current quad-core or 8-core system with 8 GB RAM, or anything involving I7, the improvement increases on the newer stuff disproportionately. If I recall correctly, some folks at RDNA reported 20 times faster on state of the art machines.

What a lifesaver!

Quote - There is now an SR2.1 ..   I don't know why it isn't SR3..

SR 2.1 corrected a specific issue beyond SR2.. has to do with opening scenes with Hidden Objects.