I was going to try and upgrade to a later version. I have used Poser since around version 8. Can anyone with some experience tell me the difference between Poser 12 and Poser 13?

Try this:

https://www.posersoftware.com/article/575/unleash-your-creativity-with-poser-13s-new-features-and-tools

For tl;dr:

New Features in Poser 13

• Updated SuperFly render engine utilizing the latest open source Cycles engine.  GPU renders of complex scenes benchmark at under half the time required for the same scene on Poser 12.
• New Post FX options for rendered images including: denoise, exposure, saturation, gamma, brightness, contrast, bloom, blur and pixelate.
• Updated animation rendering system for better productivity rendering movie sequences.
• GPU rendering on remote nodes with Queue Manager allows creation of a powerful render farm on your local network
• New app launcher with Recent and Start Up scene templates
• Updated Walk Designer and Talk Designer for better compatibility with all figure types and support of imported libraries.
• Improved adaptive sampling for faster renders.
• Improved Intel Open Image Denoise (OIDN) that uses AI to denoise SuperFly renders.
• HDRI environment rendering for SuperFly.
• Enhanced shadow catcher and included HDRI environments enable realistic 360-degree VR-like environments inside Poser
• Improved morph and weight map copying system makes creating clothing easier.
• Streamlined installer, less than a 1/4 the size of previous version.
• Improved included content delivery using Poser's content library. One click installation of included and store assets.  Over 25 GB of updated and re-organized content from Poser versions over the years.
• Mac version coming soon as included update with Metal GPU support and M1/M2 support through Rosetta.
• New online help system works in your web browser with translation & bookmarks.
• Downloadable PDF version of the manual for off-line reading

thanks so much; I was actually looking for feedback from folks who upgraded and their actual experiences with it..like known bugs or quirks;  you know ___ doesn't render as well as 13 or 12 or.. "has issues on windows 11" .. or "they moved, x__ fill in the blank".  So far I read one review where someone stated you must have internet for 13; things along those lines. Again thanks.  Sometimes older versions are more stable.. you know the old "if it ain't broke"; I typically stopped being an early adopter of many things for that reason.  Some of Corel's software comes to mind where I have found older versions better than newer, etc.  I have had nothing but issues from the version 11, at least where it comes to installation; at one point, I received a blue screen.

Okay. I upgraded from P12 to P13. It worked seamlessly. It renders a lot faster than P12 ever did. I had to of course relink my runtime, but apart from that, there were no issues on my new, powerful machine. I suggest you check minimum specifications and make sure especially your graphics card plus powerful enough and has PotiX capabilities. If it was already good for P12, you should be seamless.

Does that help?

If I remember correctly, between both version there's quite a bunch of nodes that have been corrected, which can lead to a few surprises, such as stronger glossiness, especially using Cycles.
Besides this, the PhysicalNode has been greatly enhanced

wow thanks y'all I so appreciate this!   I spent the better part of a month trying to get my 11 to work again and finally gave up! Humble Bundle has Version 12 for sale right now for 25$ but based upon your feedback it sounds like upgrading to 13 is where it is at.  I invested in an RTX 4070 i9 13900 intel laptop (I currently use a lot) and RTX 3060 Ryzen 9 5900x AMD desktop I am working on--I am not really sure how well Poser and AMD (new to AMD) will play together but we'll see.  It has been nearly 6 years since I actually rendered anything with Poser due to all of the blue screens, crashes and and now serial upgrade issues.  I am so glad to see Poser is receiving some love as I find it much more fun/user friendly to use than the "other" software out there.

Thanks again!!

I have a Ryzen 7 and both 12 and 13 work fine. I use my RTX 2060 for rendering whenever I can though. It's so much faster. I'm sure either of your will be even faster if you use superfly.

My AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D does perfectly fine with 13, though I use OptiX with this RTX4070 Ti. The rendering is fast and seamless.

My Ryzen 9 5900X also does great with P13. I also use Optix on my RTX 3070.

Afrodite-Ohki posted at 7:13 PM Sun, 18 August 2024 - #4488513

My Ryzen 9 5900X also does great with P13. I also use Optix on my RTX 3070.

I wanted to stop by and thank y'all again folks, I ended up buying version 13 and am excited to fire this up!!

I got a new machine a month or so ago and had upgraded to Poser 13. Render preset OptiX High is soooooooooooooooooooooooooooo fast. I couldn't use it on my previous computer, so I can't compare, but my renders are faster than they've ever been (and I've used Poser since version 4).

I got a new machine a month or so ago and had upgraded to Poser 13. Render preset OptiX High is soooooooooooooooooooooooooooo fast. I couldn't use it on my previous computer, so I can't compare, but my renders are faster than they've ever been (and I've used Poser since version 4).

VedaDalsette posted at 5:47 PM Mon, 9 September 2024 - #4489172

I got a new machine a month or so ago and had upgraded to Poser 13. Render preset OptiX High is soooooooooooooooooooooooooooo fast. I couldn't use it on my previous computer, so I can't compare, but my renders are faster than they've ever been (and I've used Poser since version 4).

Lool: a single character, with clothes and hair: 2 minutes, and when my new monster was up and running with the 4070: less than 12 seconds....