I'm a bit of a "computer bimbo".. I am not at all familiar w computer hardware.. I usually get my BF to help me out with that..  but he is not familiar with how Poser works which is why I am asking here instead :)

I'm thinking of upgrading my computer to get better performance from Poser specifically..

Currently I have an Intel Core i7 CPU  960     @  3.2ghz and 6GB RAM, geforce GTX 560ti gfx card 2048ram

I am using Poser Pro 2012 and currently it works "ok"..  I always render very big and lately I find that when I'm rendering I can't do anything else on the computer because it laggs alot.. I used to be able to atleast browse around on the net, but now it's getting to a point where I can't even do that..

Atm mostly my renders take anywhere from 5-6 hrs to several days.. and that's not using SSS or indirect light passes..

I started noticing this change in performance after I switched to PP 2012..

Now I'm wondering which would be better for me..  upgrading RAM or CPU... which does Poser need "more"?

Any help would be very much appreciated :)

Whatever you do, you will need more RAM, and since it is the least expensive of your options get it first.

Try rendering in background if you want to use your computer during rending.

I would be interested in knowing what your render settings are also, several days does seem excessive.

Bill

1. what does Poser needs more

depends, but TaskManager can tell you. Check the processes tab, it will tell you the memory usage. In the meantime I guess from your specs you're running on Win 64bit. My second guess is, that CPU is more the issue than memory because when memory is an issue, you'll definitely notice the disk swapping going on.

EDIT: I'm using a i7-990x@4Ghz. this guy has 6 cores / 12 threads instead of your 4 / 8 so the gain would be 12/8 * 4,0/3,2 = almost twice as fast. And I never had a Poser scene eating 6Gb ram by itself.

1. my system lags...

well, you don't need to upgrade for solving that, you just should run Poser in Low Priority mode. Again, go Taskmanager, right-click the Poser process, select the Priorities option and assign "lower than normal". After that, your mouse, internet video streams etc should run fine as they have a higher priority than the rendering.

There are more advanced options for handling this (structurally), I'll write an article about that. I'll let you know when it's published.

By the way: if you send your rendering to the queue manager, and set queue manager to low priority, you even can work on your next poser scene smoothly.

Thanks alot for the replies!

I am definately gonna check out the priorities thing.. that sounds like it could save my sanity :)

you know what? I just give you the preliminary version of the article. Full version on my website and in the Rendo tutorials within a month, I guess.

Questions welcome.

Link to file: http://www.artbeeweb.nl/aRtBee_-_Understanding_the_Poser_Program.pdf

Quote - you know what? I just give you the preliminary version of the article. Full version on my website and in the Rendo tutorials within a month, I guess.

Very nice work!

I look forward to the final version...

Quote - EDIT: I'm using a i7-990x@4Ghz. this guy has 6 cores / 12 threads instead of your 4 / 8 so the gain would be 12/8 * 4,0/3,2 = almost twice as fast. And I never had a Poser scene eating 6Gb ram by itself.

If you use large scenes you get very easily over 6GB. With a render dimension of 3000x2000 I get well over 20GB. Irradiance caching uses a whole lot of memory. Also PP2012 uses up to 25% of physical memory for its cache. So increasing memory definitely will improve performance of larger scenes

 - I use a i7 990X with 24GB of memory. Next machine will have more memory

Rendering takes 5-6hrs to several days? What in the world are you rendering? The last time a render of mine took that long was when I still had a single core, years ago and 2Gb of RAM. I've looked at your gallery and there's nothing there that should take hours to render on the machine you have. I don't have half the machine you do and the last time a render of mine took over 3 hours to render was when I rendered a scene with IDL on at 5000x3000 pixels for a poster with lot's of stuff in it.

Perhaps you can lower some of the rendering settings to gain some speed, but still have a satisfactory outcome? Also get rid of items running in the background you don't need, it does free the cpu and memory.

Quote - Also PP2012 uses up to 25% of physical memory for its cache.

I noticed that as well. Reason I returned it. My machine is at it's max memory, I cannot afford to lose that much memory and I'm sure not prepared to buy a new machine just because of Poser. While PP2012 has advantages, it comes at a price, one too high for me.

I will admit, sometimes Poser 7 takes forever with me too especially animations...It takes animations forever to render and the weird part about it, these are freaking 5 to 15 second animations, not 30 or  50 minutes. Also I figured it may be the lack of memory but then again Poser sucks sometimes. Maya never did that to me a its ten times more powerful than Poser will ever be and creates fluid animations that actually look very realistic, something Poser is not yet capable of doing at all.

Quote - I will admit, sometimes Poser 7 takes forever with me too especially animations...It takes animations forever to render and the weird part about it, these are freaking 5 to 15 second animations, not 30 or  50 minutes. Also I figured it may be the lack of memory but then again Poser sucks sometimes. Maya never did that to me a its ten times more powerful than Poser will ever be and creates fluid animations that actually look very realistic, something Poser is not yet capable of doing at all.

I'd be sticking with maya, then, if I were you. :biggrin:

Quote - I will admit, sometimes Poser 7 takes forever with me too especially animations...It takes animations forever to render and the weird part about it, these are freaking 5 to 15 second animations, not 30 or  50 minutes. Also I figured it may be the lack of memory but then again Poser sucks sometimes. Maya never did that to me a its ten times more powerful than Poser will ever be and creates fluid animations that actually look very realistic, something Poser is not yet capable of doing at all.  

Just curious why are you using Poser , when you have Maya?

Quote - I will admit, sometimes Poser 7 takes forever with me too especially animations...It takes animations forever to render and the weird part about it, these are freaking 5 to 15 second animations, not 30 or  50 minutes. Also I figured it may be the lack of memory but then again Poser sucks sometimes. Maya never did that to me a its ten times more powerful than Poser will ever be and creates fluid animations that actually look very realistic, something Poser is not yet capable of doing at all.

But that's Poser 7. A lot has changed since Poser 8 when it comes to rendering. From Poser 8 all cores are utilized as they should be, anf there's been a huge rendering speed increase. Poser 7 is very slow in rendering compared to the newer versions. After Poser 7, rendering has been optimized. So has animating, new features were added to improve. Compared to what Poser can do now, Poser 7 is kind of slow and outdated.

Quote - > Quote - Also PP2012 uses up to 25% of physical memory for its cache.

I noticed that as well. Reason I returned it. My machine is at it's max memory, I cannot afford to lose that much memory and I'm sure not prepared to buy a new machine just because of Poser. While PP2012 has advantages, it comes at a price, one too high for me.

Poser 8/PP2010 does the same thing. PoserPro has a different caching mechanism and can use even more. But memory not used is memory wasted, especially if you replace it with reading each texture from disk each time it is used.

What cache are you referring to, anyway? In which phase of which process? Just curious.

To my understanding, a user program just calls for memory. Only Windows itself is aware which pages are in RAM and which ones are virtual, in swapspace.

I am referring to the texture cache which the render engine uses. It stores all the textures it uses in a temp file on disk and then uses up to 25% of physical memory (depending on the need) to preload those textures to prevent unnecessary disk access.

I am not referring to swapping to disk which is what the OS is doing when in needs more memory and swaps out memory pages to disk to free up physical memory

I see.

Just for testing: I gave Andy2 a 0,1Mb texture map (png), this resulted in a 1Mb file in the TextureCache folder (exr format), and the consumed user ram went up with 10Mb.

At least good to know when I start doing real big Poser stuff, as my temp (and so; the Texturecache) resides on a RAM-disk so textures eat my RAM twice then. I'm learning...

It writes the textures in lossless HDR format which is a lot larger as the standard png or kpg format. In memory it is even more because it is not compressed and in bitmap format.

Poser cleans out the texture cache when you open a new scene and it might increase in size to a few GB for very large scenes, but it will not grow over time

Would ReadyBoost help with the caching?  16 GB flash drives are now under 20 bux...

I have never used ReadyBoost, so I would not know.

I have my temp file on my bootdrive which is an SSD drive and there it works incredibly fast

Quote - Would ReadyBoost help with the caching?  16 GB flash drives are now under 20 bux...

In one word, yes!

You must check the quality of memory chips, better spend a little more but be sure that they're all the same type and at the same speed.

edit: oh, if you have a SSD drive, the system will use only that, it's faster than a flash drive.

That's actually intresting because I have never really looked at Q manager but i might have a look at it.

I deliberately do not use my SSD for any temp, as SSD's are limited in their writing capacity, although http://maxschireson.com/2011/04/21/debunking-ssd-lifespan-and-random-write-performance-concerns/ states different, so have your pick.

I do dedicate some RAM to a RAM-drive, as I've got plenty (1-4Gb out of 24). And since my RAM-drive starts clean at every system-boot, I don't need any clean-ups either. And you can't beat RAM-drives for speed.

I use the SSD as my boot and app drive on my Poser machine. I use this machine only for my 3D apps and the applications use a separate hard drive to store data (runtimes, project files). I also installed PzDB on this drive which makes it very fast. So there is very little data written to the SSD - my temp file is 5.4GB after 1 year of use and I have never cleaned it. So I probably don't even meet the lowest estimate for an average life time of 5 years, which is a lot better than my HDD drives of 2-3 years.

The speed increase in loading poser, rendering, searching, installing new versions is certainly worth it. And even if I loose the disk, it is just a matter of reinstalling the data on a new SSD - no data is lost since everything is on the (backup-ed) data drives.

But putting volatile data (such as temp files) on a "normal use" machine outside the SSD is probably a wise idea, which I will do on my next "normal use" machine.