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I have just ordered a new pc to use for 3d rendering (also has to be a good games machine as well). One of the programs I use is poser 2014 on my current machine (a laptop) core i7 cpu @2.2 ghz 16gb ram and radeon HD6490 graphics set up of scenes with more than about 8 fully set up characters becomes very sluggish to move the camera about , although rendering is fine and reasonably quick. my new set up will be

Haswell core i7 4700k running at 4.4GHZ(overclocked and water cooled by the company building my pc ) 32GB 1600mhz gaming RAM and Nvida gtx Titan graphics card with 6gb GDR 5 RAM.

is the limit on the characters I can use with out slowdown dependant on system RAM? Graphics card RAM or is the view port acelerated by the graphics card as the only factor affecting its fluid motion? I have scenes in mind where I would like to use 20+ characters at the same time .

Think of this way. First there are total polygons. The more you have the more memory you use.
Then there are the skeletons.
What people forget is that every piece of non dynamic cloth has it's own skeleton in addition to all the polygon it adds.

8 Fully dressed figures is really like at least 16 naked figures before you added a sngle prop or background.

What I started doing was taking my characters into a modeling program and making fully dressed stand alone characters with only what they needed.

But that's above a lot of peoples skill level.

what I have done in the past is to set up a scene , say a room add a few characters where I want them , delete the room and save the characters, reload empty room add more characters and again delete room and save characters repeat 4 or 5 times then reload the room and import all the saved characters, renders fine but next to impossible to move the camera, and of course not much chance to make fine adjustments

Laptops usually try to prolong battery life by using an onboard graphics chip instead of the graphic card.

I had to explicitly assign Poser to my NVIDIA graphic card for a better OpenGL preview.

Still, 20 figures are a lot to process in real time for Poser's preview.

Either create permanently clothed figures like Joe@HFG suggested or try to use the "Fast Tracking" mode instead of "Full tracking". Also reduce preview texture resolution as much as possible. Disable "multilayer transparency", too.

Fast tracking converts the scene content to low resolution primitives as long as the camera is moving, thus speeding up camera movement considerably.

If the camera movement stops, the scene will rever to "Full Tracking" again.

Yes I have to do that on my laptop as it wont always use the Radeon chip for poser unless I tell it to I didnt know about fast tracking and multilayer transparency so will have a look at those while a waiting delivery of my new pc which I hope will bring about a big improvement

My laptop...... i5 2.5ghz, 6Gb Ram (yes 6 only) and a ATI Radeon HD 7450m with 1Gb of Ram, yes that's about it. Poser Pro 2012 installed and most of the OpenGL features are enabled.

I can easily add 8 fully clothed figures without the whole system getting sluggish and my specs are way way lower then yours. My record so far.... 19 fully clothed figures all with high res body & clothing textures. There are 47 smaller props, like helmets and weapons and 18 large props (siege engines, towers, walls, gate) and one huge landscape prop, everything with textures ranging from 1500x1500 to 4000x4000. System still runs fine, but I can't add more otherwise I can't render. Poser Pro 2012 responds well.

Lucky perhaps, no I don't think so. A couple of weeks I build a scene situated on one of Stonemason's cities, with at least 15 building visible. In it are 10 fully clothed figures and 12 detailed vehicles. Again no problem at all and I've got lot's of room to add more to this scene if I wanted to do so.

The next one has 9 fully clothed figures..... several layers of clothing. Then there are 7 monster figures in the scene, a city block and several props like weapons, helmets and other stuff. Again, no problem, my laptop is plowing away happily and I'm no where near the limit yet.

In other words, if my far inferior system can do this, your superior system by far should be able to hold 8 fugures without you even noticing it at all. Perhaps it's time for a thourough system check up? What's all running in the background? Virus or something like that eating away system resources?

one thing I would do is change the OpenGL settings in Poser to sReed and see what happens. Does it improve or not at all? If yes, you're graphics card is the problem. If no, switch to OpenGL again and start enabling and disabling features there to see the effects on Poser. As others have stated, check which graphics card is enabled. I've got the intel one switched off completely, the laptop only uses the ATI card, the better and faster one.

I think part of the problem is the dual graphics on my laptop it always needs to be switched to run on the Radeon graphics not the intel which for poser thats what it wants to do I originally thought having told the ati graphics centre to use high performance for poser it would then keep it , I was wrong it defaults back to intel graphics next time I run poser ,this appears to happen only for poser , as long as its turned to the right one after I start up poser it is fine.

This is on a Haswell system. ASUS notebook, GTX765m with 2 gig, Windows 8.1, running at stock frequencies. cpu 3.2 ghtz, gpu 862mhz  when idle, gpu mem at 4 ghtz.

Some of the characters have 4 conformers on them, some only have 2.

Shoes, Pants and shirts (some have dresses) Conforming hair (some have prop hair)

Lots of props, enviroment, room, etc. Poser takes up just over 4 gig when loading this scene.

Fraps shows 3 fps when using flyaround view. Panning averages about 3 as well. That is using the opengl preview with hardware shading and AO turned on, 90% limit on trans, 1024 textures.

The video card drivers are forced to do max quailty.

Same scene on my workstation gives very similar results even thou it has 16 more cpu cores and 2800 more gpu piplines.

It does not matter how powerful your machine is in the end. Everything that goes to the screen has to be smashed thru a single gpu pipeline in Opengl. DirectX11 can use two pipelines.

It wont be any faster with a 10.000 gpu pipelines, because at least 9998 of them don't have a thing to do with the last step in the bottleneck...

Is it not possible to hide the figures once placed?

Yes, select the figure, and hit ctrl h