30 fps is a lot of rendering. 

wondering if a new video card would speed things up rendering from the queue?

my first guess would be 'no', but then again, i haz no idea how the cpu and video card share workload.

Thanks

Short answer: no. You answered your own question ;). Poser uses CPU to render.

Laurie

as Laurie says it's CPU all the way.  It may seem like an intimidating upgrade but it's not too bad.  If you can find your motherboard make/model you might find that it will take a faster cpu, then you are flying :)

John.

you could check that you have done everything to make your processor and poser work well together. That means checking the number of cores you have , the number of theads poser can use, render in a seperate process, make you you have enough virtual memory assigned , check your physical memory and maybe add some if you have less than 3gb on a 32 bit system.

Also look at what tasks are running and disable all the "helper" tasks that office , winzip, and photoshop seem to start. Thats all the quickstart stuff. 

30fps is a lot of renders. You can do things with a bit of planning to speed them up, like compositing the background or even using an image background bedcause it will render faster.

There was some talk about Poser using the gpu for rendering. Was it ever implemented ? I take it thats a no.

i'm on a 64bit Dual core. 4gb but i think the m/b goes up 16gb.

looking to see what minor upgrades i can do to speed it up for now. 

hopefully, i can get a i7 or two in a few months, but i want to put the hardware money where it's going to count the most in rendering speed.  i want to render with sss turned on for character close ups.

would sharing a SAN between 2 pcs be a bottleneck for the renderQ?
looking at one of those personal cloud NAS.

If you're not a games player and don't intended to do GPU rendering then avoid a high performance graphics card as it will just increase the ambient temperature and could slow the CPUs down (turbo mode is dependant on temperature). You want a build that keeps the CPU cool if it is just Firefly renders you are doing. That said some i7 have an onboard GPU which needs to be disabled for cool running so somekind of third part video card is needed.

Firefly should respond well to overclocking, there are some members how use overclocking and be able to provide more advice on this.

Not sure about the NAS, it will impact the load times of the Poser file slightly but does it only need to load the file once or many times, would be interesting to find out if someone on the forum has used it this way.

The main problem with NAS is the network connection, if its slow or unreliable you may suffer so its important to have a good connection.

"i'm on a 64bit Dual core. 4gb but i think the m/b goes up 16gb."

You can monitor memory while using Poser and see what the actual memory and page file go up to. another 4 gb might be worthwhile.

Obviously make sure you are running a 64 bit Poser if you have the 64 bit version.

You should have poser set to use 4 threads and maybe 6 depending on what the cpu load is doing. again monitor while running poser.

Task manager and resource monitor will get you that info.

     I would want a video card which allows me to preview in Poser using OpenGL with hardware shading enabled.  Nowadays that can be done with most mid-range cards.  If you also use Vue, a goodly amount of memory on the video card will allow for a clearer preview.

     It won't affect Firefly render speed.

     For render speed, you want processor cores.  I would consider an i7 HyperThreaded quad-core (eight render threads).  If budget allows, then the H/T hex-core Xeon, or the H/T octal Xeon.

     Have a generous budget?  Get a motherboard with dual processors.  Two i7 quad-cores would render sixteen threads.  Have an absurd budget? Get dual hex processors (expensive!) or max out with a dual octal (very expensive!  but it gives 32 rendering threads).

     The other factor to consider is memory.  It doesn't affect render speed...unless Firefly approaches the limit, in which case it slows down terribly (and thrashes your hard drive).  So you want enough memory that Firefly won't run out.  How much that will be depends on the scale and complexity of your rendering habits.  Try for at least 12GB (triple channel) or 16GB (dual channel). 

guess as an ex poser user ;-)

if you stick with firefly lux etc you want better cpu /ram etc

move to cycles  octane etc you need better gpu (plus vram)

thats when the cost kicks in !!!

gpu/vram is more then cpu/ ram NOW

but what does the future hold (oy was my question)

only you can do that math

sevreral small species of small animals groving in a cave with ME

(ok its para sumat me spull chucker is bist)