Greetings all, I'm sure this has been discussed some where but I can't seem to find any threads on this with solid answers.

I'm basically looking for a way to boost the display port performance in Poser (or any CAD application, but Poser specifically).

Will CrossFire (or FirePro) or SLI have any effect on the display ports? Is there another way to help boost performance?

I've got an 8 core 3.2GHz Intel Xeon system with 16GB of ram. I'll figure out how to network the farm later but for now I would like to know what the best way to boost the display port rendering would be.

Thanks.

A better graphics card. What do you have now? And are you actually talking about the preview window?

You could overclock, depending on your setup and your tech experience.

Currently I have a Radeon 5770 :) And yes I'm talking about the preview window. The real time working view.

The 5770 is a budget gaming card for sure, and I was planning on exploring the expansion options like cross fire (adding another 5770).

From what I've heard cross fire for gaming requires that the game be programmed for it. In that context I guess a CAD program would also have to be programmed for it.

I'm not opposed to laying down the green for a bigger card, but I'm wondering if I might have the option to expand on it by buying a second one or if I'll be stuck just buying bigger cards? Or even if I buy a second 5770 if it will help any?

Is FirePro more transparent to the application? Would FirePro in CrossFire setup help the preview window?

Cheers.

I'm a new Poser user, old hand at DAZ, & you probably already know this, but if you dock the Library window in Poser, it helps to speed up performance. Though on the 64 bit version, it will not allow you to dock it. Keeping an external, not in Poser itself, content/runtimes  also helps. Like I said, you probaly already know, so if you do, just ignore me. Lol!
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Savage_dragon - the OP is talking about the OpenGL 3D graphics appearing in the preview window. The other windows, particularly the Library, have no impact on that.

Syrus: I have the 5770 and it's plenty fast, but maybe I'm not dealing with the situation you are. How many polygons are in the your scene when you experience inadequate preview rates? I don't load a million polygons, so maybe my experience isn't based on the setup you're dealing with.

The engine has to be specifically written to take advantage of SLI, and Poser is not.  I know the marketing info for various SLI cards/motherboards sounds like it works everywhere for everything, but people have benchmarked preview performance in various apps and it doesn't improve performance unless the app is written for it.

The best way by far to boost your preview performance is use one of the alternate display modes, particularly Outline - since the card doesn't have to render any polygons or lighting or textures it is muuuuuuch faster, although less comfortable to work with than the other modes.

edit: More generally, just don't load things that aren't necessary for the given task.  If you're working on a pose, you don't need to load anything but the character (without textures) and maybe the prop(s) that the character is interacting with, if any.  Don't load textures until you really need them, don't load every single morph target if you're only using 10 of them, etc.

You can switch to box tracking for the rough posing. Turn off visibility for anything thats not relevant. 

Thanks for the replies everyone!

Sounds like there's no real option for hardware expansion other than a bigger single card.

I guess I'm just asking for the moon if I want to be able to work bigger scenes at full throttle. And maybe poser wasn't really designed for complex scenes in the first place.

The box tracking sometimes gives me issues when objects are inside other objects and the bounding boxes hide details. I'll try ramping down the display mode and hiding objects I'm not using.

The 5770 is fast until I start getting into indoor scenes with 6 or more M4/V4 characters with textures; but as posted above I could simply hide the characters I'm not currently working on.

I suppose even professionals using big time studio work stations still have to use these tricks in their work flow.

I wish there were like a "fast-focus" function where you could select object hierarchies and then just press a button and "hide non-selected" like in 3DS Max. Does such a thing exist in Poser?

Quote - And maybe poser wasn't really designed for complex scenes in the first place.

That isn't really the issue, it's that the content tends to be massively resource intensive - poly counts are huge, texture memory requirements are ENORMOUS (just a single V4/M4 texture set will typically be a couple of hundred megabytes of RAM when loaded) and then there's morph targets and joint deformations.  All that has to be calculated dynamically when you just move the tip of a character's pinkie finger.  Sounds like your biggest source of overhead is probably texture memory, when you start having 6+ fully textured characters loaded at once.  If I were you I'd work with textures unloaded until you're ready to render, you can make a material collection pretty easily that is flat white with no nodes and switch back and forth as required.

You can do what you seem to want with the Hierarchy window - alt+click on UNIVERSE to hide all, and alt+click on the figure you want to work with to un-hide that figure.  This will unhide magnets also but you can set your display to not show magnets (by default it's already set to only show the magnets on the selected actor/bodypart).

Ah ha. Alt+Click in the hierarchy window. I will try that.

I've got the system chewing away on a render with some indirect lighting, after it's done I'll try playing around with the Hierarchy window.

Thanks for all the input everyone.  

Here's another possible question for Poser preview window optimization: Is there a way to create an "instance" of an object rather than a new copy?

In MAX I can create a sphere and the create an instance of it and MAX doesn't have to eat up memory for the copies since they all just refer to the original.

Nope.  This has been an asked-for feature for a long time but Poser doesn't do it at present.

edit: for geometry that is - I'm pretty sure Poser is bright enough to handle re-used texture files in the same scene as single objects in memory

I made a scaled set of the hi-res textures for V4 and M4 because 4000 x 4000 textures are justoverkill for the image sizes I normally use. If something is in close up I will reload the full size texture.  4000 x 4000 = 16 mb x 3 (color depth) 3000 x 3000 is 9 mb x 3 so about half memory requirement.

As bagginsbill said the 5770 is plenty fast but its downfall is no double point floating precision and only a 128 bit bus for memory. Processor wise I'm sure its more than capable. But your probably maxing out its memory. Another 5770 in crossfire isn't going to help you with that as you still only have 1gb of memory available.   I just sold my saphire 5770 and it overclocked very well but was a reference model so it had voltage control.

A couple questions.

What 5770 do you have? Some allow better overclocking than others.

What drivers are you using?

More than one display?

What version of poser?

I'm assuming your running a 64bit os, but ya never know.

and lastly, what resolution are you running? The 5770 really slows down above 1680x1050.