Hello, Starting to get comfortable with Poser 12 and looking beneath the surface! So looked into Render settings. My cpu is shown but not the graphics card. This is an Nvidia GeForce GT 240.. Is this now too old to register in the program? All the possible render settings offered produce results Could I also ask without, hopefully, too many contemptuous sneers and giggles about the pro and cons of cpu versus gpu rendering and vice versa.

Thanks

I know that I read somewhere about the fact of Cycles going forward at some point the older cards are going to stop being supported, due to older versions of drivers not being able to keep up. I have a newer AMD Ryzen 5 3600 which is a lot faster then my last computer, However between the CPU and the 1070 card the GPU card will render between 2 to 3 times faster. I just need to wait for the newer cards to come into stock and from tests results I have seen it should be 2-3 times faster then my 1070.

Keep your old card and buy a new one and use both. Even if you can't use the old card to render it will be running your monitor and freeing up the new card for renders..you WILL see improvement in render speeds over just having the new card render while it refreshes the monitor.

I don't know whether the GT 240 is supported, but it can't hurt to make sure you have the most up-to-date drivers for it. You can get any NVIDIA drivers here:

https://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us

I suspect if I put my old 1070 back in the computer to keep the 2080 Super company it will overload the power supply and/or overheat the computer. :)

Thank you all. ChromeStar the last available driver update was back in late 2016! Things move on so quickly! When we get this 'plague' sorted I hope to get a new machine. Even so my present computer renders pretty quickly . Compared to older versions of Poser ( I go back to 3) the speed, capacity and stability of 12 are all excellent. (I can render now without crossing my fingers or wondering what I could remove from a scene to have a chance of a complete render,) That said I hope it would not be too presumptuous to thank Larry Weinberg and and subsequent developers for the pleasure that Poser has given me, Seasons greetings!

Interesting...

FWIW, to be significantly faster than my AMD FX 8350 4x2 core and twin GTX 750 Ti cards, I'd have to spend serious money. For price of one (1) 'modern' GPU card, would be cheaper to buy an "AMD Ryzen 5 2600X 3.6GHz (Turbo 4.2GHz) Six Core Twelve Thread CPU, ASUS Prime B450M-A Motherboard & 16GB 3200MHz Corsair DDR4 RAM Pre-Built Bundle", throw it in a budget case with a fair PSU and HDD, use it as a networked CPU render engine...

Thanks NikKelly, That answers my original thought about cpu vs gpu. A few years ago sound cards were all the thing now my sound 'thingy' is buried in the mother board! The last computer update I received also included the gpu in the mb! ( I draw the line at that. I'm sure the production of decent graphics is harder than that of sound?)

The Intel GPUs suffer serious performance issues, in part because they have no dedicated memory of their own (they just use the same system memory you're trying to use for everything else). That's fine for day to day use and even basic utility like playing videos, and may save power too, but if you want to actually make the GPU do serious work it's not a solution. Sometimes the onboard GPU is actually a hindrance when it won't get out of the way and let the real GPU do the work.

Chromestar, Thank you. Sorry if this has been covered previously but, if starting from scratch, what computer set up would do Poser 12 most justice. As I said earlier I'm thinking of a new machine when things have settled down. Also what about this business of checking 'separate process'?

The "separate process" option lets you specify that, rather than have the Poser program that is already running calculate your scene, it should start up a separate thread to do that. That used to give better performance and stability, at a cost of a little more startup time, but people have suggested it doesn't give an advantage anymore. I haven't tested it, can't say for sure. It does appear to cause some issues lately if the box is checked.

In terms of what is important for Poser to run fast, I'm not an expert on this for Poser and maybe others will add comments, but here are some remarks about what to look for:

A fast CPU. If you look at Intel CPUs, there is the general type (i3, i5, i7, i9); the i7 and i9 are higher performance while the i3 is the economy line. These labels have been in use for a decade (except i9 is new), and to specify how old the CPU there's also a "generation." The first generation a decade old; the current generation is the 10th or 11th. An old i7 may have worse performance than a new i5. You can figure out the generation from the model number by looking at the thousands place, e.g. I'm running an i7-6700. That's 6th generation. The i7-9700 is 9th generation. The i9-10900 is 10th generation. Generally the improvements from one generation to the next have not been huge and I don't think it's critical to be constantly updating here, and it is the hardest part to update (it might require a whole new motherboard). But if you are buying a new computer, you might as well go as good as you can afford since you will probably keep it a long time. The other metrics for the CPU are the number of cores (each processor is actually a bunch of little processors bundled together, more cores let it do more things at once) and speed. For speed, Intel reports a base frequency (e.g. 2.80 GHz) and a max turbo frequency (e.g. 4.80 GHz). The base frequency is the normal speed, and the turbo frequency is the speed when it's under a heavier load. Bottom line here is higher is better.

AMD also makes CPUs and I don't have any experience with them, but have heard good things lately. So I can't really recommend for or against, or explain their lineup.

If you want direct comparisons of CPUs, none of the specs will really help you much. Higher frequency is better, new generation is better, but what's the trade-off between an older generation with a lower frequency? For that you have to look at the benchmarks. For example here's a list of benchmarks for higher end CPUs: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html That also includes the AMD CPUs.

Second, you want a lot of memory. Poser is juggling multiple big 3D models each with multiple textures and maps. It's much, much faster to work with those in memory than constantly having to read them from the disk. I would say 16 GB is the minimum amount of system memory to consider, and 32 would be better. (I have 24.) This is relatively easy to upgrade yourself later on, if the computer has slots for more.

Third, you still need to read things off the disk sometimes. Performance will be better with a solid-state drive (SSD) than a conventional hard drive. An SSD is basically just a type of memory that doesn't forget when it is turned off, whereas a conventional hard drive has spinning disks and a moving read head. The SSD has some advantages from fewer moving parts and they are generally much faster. More expensive too. If cost is an issue, an intermediate solution is to get a medium-sized SSD as your main system drive (maybe 500 GB?) to install all your programs on and a larger conventional drive for other files.

Fourth, there's the GPU. If you are doing superfly renders, the GPU will do them faster than the CPU. I really only know the NVIDIA options so, again, don't take this as an endorsement vs the alternatives, but you do want a real video card and not any onboard option. Poser 12 now has support for the newer NVIDIA cards and the performance is very good. The 2000-series cards (2060, 2070, 2080) added hardware support for ray-tracing which in Poser shows up as "Optix" rendering, and gives a good speed boost. There are Super versions of these cards (e.g. 2080 Super) which were a bit of a bump up in performance. And then there's the newer 3000-series cards which are even faster. The x060 (2060, 3060) is the entry level for each generation, the x070 is a middle ground that gives good performance at an intermediate cost, and the x080 is the higher end, with an x080 Ti even higher. The 1000-series did not have the ray-tracing support, they still worked well in Poser (I had a 1070 before I upgraded) and will do perfectly fine, just not as fast.

Again, if you want to compare between models, brands, and generations, the specs won't really help you, look at the benchmarks, for example https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html There are a ton of old GPUs on Ebay, too, but I'm not sure how good the deals are. I hear availability of the new 3000-series cards is not very good currently though.

If you upgrade the GPU later on, you need to make sure there is physically enough space for it in the case, and that the power supply of the computer can provide enough power. GPUs take a lot of power and generate a lot of heat when they are working hard. But if you buy a computer that already has one, those things should not be concerns.

ChromeStar, Many thanks for your clear, comprehensive covering of the matter, it's much appreciated. I used to to a lot of oil painting, a lot simpler and cheaper (but messier and no delete or restore!) Thanks again and keep safe!

I'd like to add some extra hard-disk related information: it seems that it exists what they call hybrid hard disk: a traditional hard disk with some dedicated ssd part, in which the electronic stores the most frequently used files. This is purely transparent and Windows only sees one hard drive.

I think that was a good transitional step but SSDs have dropped enough in price that it now makes more sense to just get an SSD. You can get 1 TB drives for under $100. (I actually didn't realize they dropped that much, but I just went to look.)

There are also performance differences in SSDs. To break them down into two simplified groups, there are newer NVMe M.2 drives that install like mini expansion cards, and there are SATA drives (generally SATA III) that install like conventional hard drives. If you're getting a new computer, one that supports an NVMe M.2 drive is generally going to be faster. If you're replacing a drive in an existing computer (or adding an additional drive), a SATA drive might be the only option. It's still a big step up from a conventional drive in either case.

ChromeStar posted at 3:49PM Sat, 02 January 2021 - #4409257

I think that was a good transitional step but SSDs have dropped enough in price that it now makes more sense to just get an SSD. You can get 1 TB drives for under $100. (I actually didn't realize they dropped that much, but I just went to look.)

There are also performance differences in SSDs. To break them down into two simplified groups, there are newer NVMe M.2 drives that install like mini expansion cards, and there are SATA drives (generally SATA III) that install like conventional hard drives. If you're getting a new computer, one that supports an NVMe M.2 drive is generally going to be faster. If you're replacing a drive in an existing computer (or adding an additional drive), a SATA drive might be the only option. It's still a big step up from a conventional drive in either case.

Wow... you're right! the "SAMSUNG SSD 870 QVO (SATA-III, 1000 GB)" for example just jump below the CHF 100.- limit and seems really interesting for a 2.5" drive, in terms of performances.

I'm unsure if true, but I've been warned by usually-reliable IT friend that my proposed networked 'Render Box' must have a C: HDD as the render process would thrash a 'SATA' SSD...

But: SSD re-write 'wear' has improved, also error trapping. Neither of us know in detail how Poser's External Render module uses system resources...

What I took from other posts on this topic was 16 GB RAM plus ALL the CPU cycles you can muster. In my case, latter looks like a fast, 16-thread Ryzen_7...

I'm not sure if wear is a real problem anymore, but the more memory you have, the less data needs to be swapped out, so fewer writes.

I've got a render going right now, there is very little disk activity, but it's using just over 6 GB of ram for Poser (plus all the usual for Windows itself), plus 8 GB of graphics memory. This is a GPU render, would probably be different for a CPU render. The .pz3 file is only 610 MB.

Hi all I also have a problem with poser 12 not recognizing my video card . Mine is a rx 6800 and I thought Poser 12 should see it now that it supports amd cards unless I read that wrong .