1Gb Athlon, 256Mb Ram, Win 98. 1 minute 48 seconds

Just for the hell of it I ran the test on my 4 year old HP Pavilion 4404 just to see how it measured up. After reading everyone else's results, and using a sports stopwatch, I was very happy with 115 seconds. I have only 146meg of Ram, AMD K6 processor and 20gig hard drive with about 15gig free plus still running Win98 first edition. With these low specs you learn to save frequently in Poser4 or lose it buster. Tommy.

44 seconds. AMD XP 1800+, 1GB DDR RAM, 60GB IBM 60GXP. I noticed some interesting things. Creatings the shadow maps takes about 6 seconds. 100% CPU usage. The rest is then 38 seconds where CPU usage is not 100% anymore. It fluctuated between 80 and 50% with an average around 70%. During that time I hear the harddisk. It seems Poser is not only showing the rendered image on screen but also writing it on the harddisk. Jim, since you have exactly the same rendering time, I am very interested in the rest of your configuration. (HD type, partitions, FAT32 or NTFS etc) I'm suspecting the harddisk to be the bottleneck. My harddisk configuration is not the fastest possible because I have 10GB FAT32 partition (win9x) and then a 50GB NTFS partition on which I run Poser. Maybe it would be a little faster if located on that 10GB partition. (I've been thinking about installing w2k adv server on that partition so I might have some info on that later) I'll also look at defragmenting the drive. (first have to install a better defragger since the default one with w2k is pretty hopeless) Marc

I got 73 seconds. This is with a dual Athlon 1700+, 1 gig DDR RAM Registered ECC, Tiger Tyan MP Motherboard, Windows XP Pro, dual monitor setup. I'm surprized that mtjevries got substantially better times. I would have suspected I would have been closer . . . I didn't close down everything that I had up -- but CPU utilization was running around 50% . . .

I ran the CPU test from Jim Burton this morning. With my wristwatch (with stopwatch function) in my left hand and my mouse in my right hand---I clicked render. 37 Seconds. Athlon 1800+, 512 mb of DDR, and crippled with (according to Kyko..see above) Windows XP home edition. My drive is a Maxtor 120 gig formatted with FAT32, running in ATA 133 mode. I wonder if the speed increase over almost every thing else that I see posted here is due to my Abit motherboard with the new KT266A chipset?

Hmm 73 seconds quite a large difference from 44. A dual board will have some overhead, but not that much. Did you see the same change in CPU utilization I saw? Did you hear harddisk activity? What is your harddisk type and config?

Johnnydnh: I don't think it is the motherboard. I have an Epox 8KHA+ with that same KT266A chipset. In most benchmarks these mobo's perform exactly the same. Did you also have harddisk activity? I know my harddisk is still one of the fastest available. I've seen some Maxtors that are just a tad faster when only one program is accessing them. A D740 model if I remember correctly. Is that the one you have? FAT32 is usually also a little faster then NTFS. Marc

Um, okay, I deleted a bunch of stock Poser stuff to make room, including the Business Man and the Casual boy, among others... How about another test? Say, including the Poser Dork in the Poser Jeans, on a ground plane, with ten spheres with no mapping and default lighting? 8-D

I decided to run Jim Burton's CPU test on my old machine, a Pentium III 850 GHZ, 512 megs of SDRAM, Windows 98 SE and a completely jam-packed Maxtor 40 gig harddrive in ATA 66 mode. 1 minute, 21 seconds or 81 seconds total. I was impressed! I am planning to reformat the drive and install Windows XP on this but not until I get everything moved over to my Athlon 1800. I will be interesting to see what the difference in render performance between Windows 98SE and XP is. What is the difference between XP's Home and Professional Editions....besides the price? Are there any benefits to performance?

well, maybe running only the test whitout any other appl the performance is similar in home or pro OS. OK now run too photoshop, Max,xplorer at time :)

Mjtdevries: My Maxtor drive is not the fastest one, I think you are referring to the 7200 rpm version, mine is 5400 rpm. I am not certain of the model number because I bought an OEM drive with no paperwork. Consulting your post above (44 seconds), it would appear that maybe your hard drive configuration is slowing you down. From the tests that I have read, your IBM drive should be faster than my Maxtor 120 gig. Why don't you re-try the test using an external stop watch instead of having the task manager open? That could be the difference right there.

Johnnydnh: I didn't only try it with Task manager open. (Of course not, I wanted the fastest time ;-)))) But it didn't make any difference. I'm suprised that you have a 5400rpm disk. So apparantly it's not just the harddisk speed. Filesystem, defragmentation and place on the harddisk could still make a difference. I installed norton speedisk but it is still defragmenting (already two hours...) I can't really think of other things that could cause the difference. Marc

I just ran the test again with my Internet Explorer open and connected to the internet. This time the result was 39 seconds. So background activities do make an impact...albeit a small one. I forgot to mention earlier that my 120 gig Maxtor is formated with only one 120 gig partition. Is it better to partition?

My "good" machine (AMD 1.4) does have a Asus A7V motherboard, which was all the rage when I built it about a year ago. I also actually installed the drivers for the DMA 99 drives (two WD 30 GB ones that support it). The drives are both formatted Fat 32, incidently, I don't actually know if they run during the render or not, as i seem to have neglected to hook up the HD light. ;-) Anyway, from the results so far it looks like AMDs don't do too bad, Pentium 3s aren't all that bad either. Wish we could get some results on some of the faster Celerons, and some on Macs, especially 700 Mhz+ G4s. I'll do the test Tuesday on my Mac G3 400, I'm sure it is going to be over 5 minutes. Sort of an old turkey, but it doesn't get email viruses!

My machine finally finished defragmentation. Rendering again took 44 seconds. Exactly the same as before LOL! Tried on my Win98 installation. (without proper display drivers, just in 64048016 because it somehow refuses other resolutions) Rendertime was 45 seconds. Did a fresh install of Win2000 advanced server on that first 10GB partition with FAT32 filesystem. Only installed DirectX8.1, Radeon8500 drivers and Wacom tablet drivers. Rendering now took 43 seconds. Wow! 1 second faster :-)))) So, it's not the filesystem, it's not the place on the harddisk. It's not the harddisk itself. So why is Johnnydnh's system faster? I can't believe it is because he is running XP, but I might try an install of that later this week. Marc

Mjtdevries: I've got the Radeon 8500 too. Our machines seem very similar with the only major difference being the operating system. I would be very interested to see the results of your test after installing Windows XP. I timed the creating shadow map portion of the test at 5 seconds and 32 seconds to render.

I've Just run JB's test on my old celeron just to be nosey. From ctrl-r to done in 95 seconds. Celeron 600@750, Win 2K pro, 256mb ram, BX board, Seagate 7200rpm drive using NTFS. Nothing else running, max ram usage about 160, cpu hovering high 80s to flat out.

Just installed XP pro on that same 10GB partition. Only other thing installed: Wacom tablet drivers. Not even the ATI Radeon drivers. Rendering result again 43 seconds. (just shows again that the 3D card is not used by Poser) I don't have XP home edition, so I can't test that. Anybody have any bright ideas what could be causing the difference with johnnydnh's machine? (Apart from XP home edition being that much different from XP Pro?) Marc

Looks like PowerToysXP has been pulled until april.

O.K., did run it on my Mac: Mac G3-400, O.S. 9.0.4, 256 MB RAM, 5 minutes, 43 seconds.

Flash forward nearly two years. On a dual 1.8GHz G5 running an optimized 9.2 in emulation, 72.97 seconds.