(RobynsVeil)

Quote - So, I'd make an awesome tester for P10/PP20xx on a low-end system! :biggrin:

     I would say that empirical data on how a program behaves on a low-end system is at least as useful as data on how it runs on a hot rod system.

 

(MikeMoss)

Quote - I just can't see how 14 hours is possible unless something is really off someplace.

     It may only indicate complexity and scale of the project.  Or, yeah, it could be due to a disasterous choice of render settings.  :P    I can recall taking four and a half days to render a wallpaper.  But, my desktop is 5120x1600 pixels (two 2560x1600 monitors linked as one continuous desktop), there was a huge number of polygons in the scene, and lots special effects using displacement, IDL, reflection, etc.

(3anson)

Quote -
amount of ram available has little if no effect on render times.

     That is conditionally true.  The condition is that Firefly won't need more RAM than what is already installed.  In such a case, more RAM won't speed it up.  However, if the scene is complex {lots of polygons, uses materials calling for lots of calcs, the render quality settings are high, and the pixel dimensions are high} so that Firefly starves for RAM and begins thrashing the hard drive to compensate, then adding more RAM would be like nitrous oxide injection:  it will make a huge -and cost effective- improvement.  I've seen Cameron draw a little over 48GB during a maxed-out Firefly render.

     Judging from my experience, a machine with 16GB (dual channel) or 24GB (triple channel) would rarely if ever run short of memory, even if you are a "power user".  Most Poser users will never exhaust 4GB;  hence, 3anson's point.

     To Demon2330, do you see a lot of on-off hard drive activity when you are rendering?  If so, then more RAM may indeed be worthwhile.  If you don't see lots of hard drive activity during a render, then the limitation is likely just processor cycles.  My laptop Pixie has good capacity (8GB RAM), but the processor is a straight dual core (not HyperThreaded) of modest clock speed, so she is pretty slow at rendering, even though Firefly isn't using even half the available memory.  This is OK, because her intended use is to model, work up materials, and do scene setup.  I do the rendering on the big workstations.  More memory would not speed Pixie up.

     On WinXP, you can open the Task Manager during a render to see how much memory is being used.  On Vista and Win7, you can get sidebar gadgets that display usage of both memory and processor capacity.

     Is your operating sytem 32bit or 64bit?  Also, before you buy RAM, you need to check whether your motherboard's controller chipset can read that much memory.  For example, my older worksatation Galadriel has three RAM slots with 4GB in each slot, totaling 12GB.  I had in mind replacing them with three 8GB sticks to total up to 24GB, but the chipset can only read 12GB.  So, it's already maxed out.

Poser 12, in feet.  

OSes:  Win7Prox64, Win7Ultx64

Silo Pro 2.5.6 64bit, Vue Infinite 2014.7, Genetica 4.0 Studio, UV Mapper Pro, UV Layout Pro, PhotoImpact X3, GIF Animator 5