I recently had a hard drive crash and in the process of restoring everything I reinstalled Poser (P8.0.3.11793) and installed a new video card. Since then Poser has been acting very strange. Sometimes it seems that the mouse is pointing to somewhere other than where the pointer is, and Poser itself behaves in fits and starts. Take a look at the attached image. Here the mouse is way down on her left shin, but look at all the "hot spots" that are lit up. Everything from her right eye down to her left shin. Poser has always been a little inaccurate with what it selects, but this is ridiculous.

I've also noticed that sometimes when I rotate the camera, nothing changes in the scene but the lights in the light panel go spinning around the globe just like they should. Sometimes after a lag of 5 to 15 seconds the scene will "catch up" with where it's supposed to be.

Myself, I suspect the video card (an ATI Radeon HD 4850 Series), but I really have no idea.

Quote - I recently had a hard drive crash and in the process of restoring everything I reinstalled Poser (P8.0.3.11793) and installed a new video card. Since then Poser has been acting very strange. Sometimes it seems that the mouse is pointing to somewhere other than where the pointer is, and Poser itself behaves in fits and starts. Take a look at the attached image. Here the mouse is way down on her left shin, but look at all the "hot spots" that are lit up. Everything from her right eye down to her left shin. Poser has always been a little inaccurate with what it selects, but this is ridiculous.

I've also noticed that sometimes when I rotate the camera, nothing changes in the scene but the lights in the light panel go spinning around the globe just like they should. Sometimes after a lag of 5 to 15 seconds the scene will "catch up" with where it's supposed to be.

Myself, I suspect the video card (an ATI Radeon HD 4850 Series), but I really have no idea.

 

Do you have by any chance set the tablet mode to ON in the general preferences?

 

Nope, that's not it.

Take a look at this new screen shot. Here I loaded Vickie, covered half of her with the Library window, and rotated the camera. It looked like nothing had happened until I moved the Library window out of the way. The half that was hidden by the Library window had behaved as it should have, but not the other half that had remained visible. After several seconds the scene snapped to where it should be.

try switching to sreed for tghe display and see if that helps.

Bingo! That did it. My understanding is that you want to use OpenGL if you can, so why doesn't my new, supposedly kick-ass video card use OpenGL?

My experiences have been that OpenGL causes more headaches than it's worth... Of course my video card and Mac are anything but state-of-the-art (Well, it used to be a fancy computer). Anyway, I use the same version of Poser as you do (8.0.3) and initially had hardware acceleration activated for preview and encountered similar bugs, particularly when I would load very complex shaders, so reverted back to SreeD display. I personally see OpenGL as more of a luxury than a necessity, always got along fine without out in Poser 6 and 7 on my last machine, but I imagine that Poser users with more sophisticated hardware and 64-bit have a different perspective.

Try making sure you have the latest drivers for your card.

I have a Radeon 5770 card which is hardly state of the art, but it does OpenGL fine in PP2012. However,  I will say that I did have some glitches in Poser 8 with OpenGL on a different machine with a rather ancient Radeon  X1300 card, but it was still quite usable...

I found with my nvidia 6200 card (yes its that old ) that the later drivers were a disaster. My latest driver is from 2009 .

If you have isolated opengl as the problem you may want to look at an older driver for the card.

Quote - ... If you have isolated opengl as the problem you may want to look at an older driver for the card.

 

^--- This.

 

There are even third-party drivers for some cards that are no longer being updated. I used one for an old legacy card, just to keep its OpenGl capabilities within reason for 3D work. It was a custom driver written by a video-card driver enthusiast. :D

 

PS - You can even find Voodoo drivers out there!

 

Wait! Don't go away yet!

I thought I had the problem fixed by changing to SreeD, but take a look at what happens when I use the morph tool. It looks like there's still a problem with the video card and its drivers.

I thought about calling AMD tech support, but looking at their forums I can't even see a reference to sreed so I'm not sure they will know what I'm talking about. So I'm back here. Do I just need to download some of their old drivers and play with them until I see what works, or should I just return this graphics card and try another one?

I'm not sure which version of the drivers you have, but these work with Poser Pro 2012 on my HD 4250 secondary display, and the 5570 primary display (link is to the 64-bit driver)...

http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/windows/legacy/Pages/legacy-radeonaiw-vista64.aspx

EDIT: I saw your OS in the sig; here are the 32-bit Vista drivers...

http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/windows/legacy/Pages/legacy-radeonaiw-vista32.aspx

PS; the HD 4850 chipset on the card you are using is about 5 years old...

OK, it looks like it was the graphics card. I talked to tech support at AMD, and it turns out that the card I got was great for gaming but not for rendering. I had assumed that if it was good enough for gaming, it would be good enough for rendering.

I traded it in for a card that at least knows OpenGL, but only has 128 MB of memory. Not good enough.

Can somebody recommend a good basic graphics card for Poser work so I can stop wasting my time on these hardware problems and get back to wasting my time 3d art?

I wanted a better card than the onboard graphics but my machine only has an agp port. (I think thats right) A friend found a used nvidia gefirce 6200 with 512 mb memory.

 

Note: the graphic card does nothing for rendering, opengl is used for preview display only.

Here is a small utility to show you the opengl version you have.

http://www.topicscape.com/download3.php

It is not very large and gives youinformation on the graphics card and opengl version. It will also do some tests of opengl.

Thanks for the link. It tells me that my card can run OpenGL but the compatibility test crashes. Don't know that it really matters.

So how much memory do you need on the graphics card? Is 512 MB enough?

I would say yes,  Poser 7 for me ran very nicely with only 128 mb allocated to an onboard video.

Quote - I would say yes,  Poser 7 for me ran very nicely with only 128 mb allocated to an onboard video.

Poser 7 doesn't use OpenGL.

 

As I noted above, I use a PowerColor Radeon HD 5570 card that works well with a 4250 as the secondary display that also works, but they are scarce these days because they are older GPUs.

 

Were I going to replace it today, I would likely get this one; the HD 6670 is pretty comparable to the HD 4850 performance-wise...

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814131440