I have a 800MHz Athlon CPU with about 500 MB of RAM and I still find Poser Pro Pack slow. I do a lot a work with high rez texture maps and lots of lights so some of that is to be expected. Howerver, Poser still loads large files very slowly and takes a while to "recover" after rendering.

Memory is dirt cheap now. Does any know if having 1000Mb of RAM in my system will speed thing up apreciably? Or would my money be better spent on a faster CPU?

I am running Windows 2000 SP1 with the default Preformance Options/Memory settings (paging file at 384MB). Hard drive speed is 7200 RPM.

Anyone out there have a system configuration where Poser performance is zippy? Or are there any good registry hacks that could speed thing up a bit?

Any info would be appreciated.

Personally, I'm a firm believer in CPU upgrades. My first computer was a 16mhz.(that's NOT a typo) zenith. and I've been upgrading ever since. So you can see...I've been doing this stuff for a long, long time ;-) Some people are hung up on RAM and video cards. But in my experience. I've never seen anywhere near as much performance gains as upgrading a few hundred mhz. My 1Ghz. system with 128 meg. Ram zips along fairly nicely. ScottA

Well, Boot up poser and and all the other apps you have running at the same time. Pick the most complicated scene as well. Now bring up your task manager and see how much is shown in performance under the commit charge total. If your total is well past the total physical ram you have, you might want to buy more ram. Mines showing 170megs in win2k with just a few windows and internet explorers running. But my Largest scene in bryce brings it to 1.15gigs total ram committed. In that particular picture, when i went from 512 to 1gig of ram i found a major change in performance. Due to the lack of harddrive swapping.

Motherboards vary in the amount of RAM that they can address. Make sure you check into that before you run out and buy more RAM. Cal

I don't know anything about PPP, but I've noticed Poser performs better using just raw CPU power. I've conducted an in-house benchmark using Poser4 with Vicky2 I've run Poser on a 266, 500, 700 and 1.2 all with 64 MB and the 1.2 Gig outperformed the 266, 500, 700, & 733. The loading time increases about an average of 8 seconds with each processor speed. It took the 500 about 52 seconds to load. on the 1.2 it took a mere 14 seconds. Also to my knowlege of Poser, poser doesnt care what video board you have, I have also done tests on this, I don't think you'll get your money worth in poser if you buy that GeForce2 or 3... 500MHz with 3dfx Voodoo3 AGP /w 16 MB and a WD 512KB ISA had the same speep performance in poser. Win98 SE was the OS, used in the tests. My conclusion testing RAM vs CPU in poser. Go for the CPU speed. I agree that that even a 200MHz upgrade is good. Running poser on a 700 is a lot better then running on a 500. Heck since ram is dirt cheap while you upgrade your processer buy a few hundred megs to go with it... This was just my $0.03 I hope I was a little informative

One rule of thumb for swap files is to make them slightly more than 2x the ram