Starkdog posted at 12:30 PM Sat, 11 December 2021 - #4431613

Which is more important with Poser- CPU and RAM or GPU?

Poser12 uses - like its predecessor - Cycles as a render engine. And P12 renders significantly faster than P11 (CPU and GPU). In addition, according to the rumor mill and an official article from Bondware, the programmer who originally implemented Cycles in Poser and is very familiar with Cycles has been tasked with reworking Poser's Cycles implementation and incorporating new features (which also benefits speed). How far this has progressed or how far this will go remains to be seen. The original (Cycles in Blender) is fast even with "only" CPU - if the hardware allows it (means fast CPU, but above all fast memory, e.g. RAM). Nevertheless, there is still a speed advantage for GPU if a graphics card from the last generation (upper end of the price scale) is used. Otherwise, a modern CPU with access to very fast memory could already be faster – or at least fast enough :)

As for the amount of RAM in general: it is an important factor in any 3D application. The larger, more elaborate and higher resolution the models, the more of them in a scene, the more memory is needed. For the final render itself, it's probably not so dramatic: 16 Gig is sufficient in the vast majority of cases for CPU rendering, without the computer having to continuously swap data out and read it back in. But in many cases 8 Gig will do as well.

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