I recently purchased a FirePro V3900 card specifically to use with Poser, but I'm having problems I've never had before. From time to time the Preview window will not respond to camera movements, figure translations or rotations, etc. I have to click somewhere inside the window to get it in sync. Sometimes the whole Preview window is frozen, but sometimes only part of it is, so, for example, you can see the rightmost quarter responding but the rest is frozen.

I've opened a support ticket with AMD, but I thought I'd ask here also while they are working on it.

If you are not using highend workstation class 3D software like Maya or 3DMax don't buy a highend workstation class graphics card.  Try to get your money back then buy a decent game card, nVidia cards would allow using CUDA based render engines that use the GPU to assist rendering.

The V3900 is actually considered an entry-level workstation graphics card. I had a card designed for gaming prior to the V3900 but that one didn't work well with OpenGL. The V3900 was the card AMD recommended to me when I told them my requirements included Poser.

I don't give a rodent's rear what AMD told you, they probably just heared "3D software" and thought immediately to recommend a pro series card.  Everything I have read here, DAZ forums and BlenderArtist forum suggest they are not good cards for Studio, Poser or Blender.  And when I said, "decent game card", I meant better than some $80 budget card but not some expensive UberNerd game card, I suspect many of those are optimized for DirectX.

Although Poser can and is used by some professionals it is regarded as hobbist program and as such does not need a graphics workstaion to work.  Support for OpenGL is useful    it can improve the scene preview by showing better representation of textures and shadows.  

I have been using Poser for the best part of ten years and have never prurchased anything more than an 'average' game card as for as graphics is concerned as it is only used for preview, all the rendering is done by the processor.  The only exception to this is some of the new render engine that use the GPU for renders. 

The advice I recieved when I started was that you need not pay the earth for the graphics card and any money saved was better spent on buying a processor with as many cores as possible and as much memory as youe system or operating system could support.  I think the only change ten years on would, in addition, be to make sure you are running a 64bit Operating system.

looks like that card is only about $100...about in line with the kind of cards you guys are talking about.

It wasn't just AMD I spoke to; I started a thread here when I first noticed a problem with Poser and a new card.

If you visit that thread you can see images of some of the problems I was having.

The video card that I originally had with my machine worked fine, but got fried. The first replacement was one of those "kick-ass" gaming cards, but it didn't do OpenGL, so I traded it in for a low end card that was OpenGL compliant, but that was too slow, so after doing some research I ended up with the V3900.

The main thing I learned from all that was that the requirements of gaming cards is different from cards for this kind of graphics work.

Didn't like the 6670 I recommended in the other thread, eh?  I take it you are using the latest drivers from AMD...

http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/fire/Pages/fire_vista32.aspx

If you where having similar problems with sreed that suggest something other than the graphics card.  Do you use a tablet, trackball, or 'mega-mouse' (a mouse with more button, wheels or thumb pads than you have fingers)?  These have been known to interfere with the display in Studio and Poser.

When I was looking at prices a few years ago any Firepro was expensive but then I am based in the UK so that will have an impact on the asking price. 

Despite the supposed difference between the requirments for rendering or gaming I have never had a problem with running Poser and I have always used supposedly gaming cards and never more than mid-range.  Also when using the term rendering with graphics it should still be remebered that it is only the preview we are talking about it is not involved with the render unless you are using OpenCL which is a very different beast to OpenGL.

Quote - Didn't like the 6670 I recommended in the other thread, eh?  I take it you are using the latest drivers from AMD...

http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/fire/Pages/fire_vista32.aspx

I didn't llisten to you and now I am hanging my head in shame.

Until I reread my own thread, I had forgotten that I was having this problem with the preview window "stalling" with the "gaming" card, also. That was just overwhelmed by the other problems.

Since you are having problems with both cards, I wonder if something else might be the problem, but I have no idea what that might be... :sad:

Just a wild thought; open Task Manager whilst Poser is running and check your free memory; perhaps something is hogging RAM and causing swapping...

Did you do a full uninstall of all old drivers when you changed cards? You may have to manually remove stuff from the regisrty to do it properly. (Video control sets need removed, so do the straglers that leaves behind.)

Drivesweeper can remove most issues, read up on it before you run it thou.

http://www.guru3d.com/content-page/guru3d-driver-sweeper.html

Do you have built in video on the motherboard too? And if you do, is that disabled in the bios and excluded in device manager?

Is your motherboard Bios PCIe 2.1 compatable? Some are not.

There are a ton of drivers for it as well. But you should be using this one.

http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/fire/Pages/fire_win7-64.aspx

The above driver works fine with V7800 and V8800's.

There are more than a few older versions as well. You may have to experiment to see which one works the best. Just remember to completely uninstall each time.

Anyone ever get a strobey freak out every time you rotate the camera or move it around?  Very annoying.