I'd be interested to know what type and power of CPU people are using with poser and the amount of RAM used.

I'd appreciate comments on usability and responsiveness.
I'm using an aged PII 400 with 512meg RAM and I can get by, but there are a heck of a long delay when loading files.

Presumably latest whizzbang toy for mega bucks will solve all, but what sits well in between?

Hi :-)

As a general rule I would stuff in as much RAM as you can, especially with it being quite cheap at the moment. This can often make a big difference to graphic intensive programs like good ol' Poser.

If you get the opportunity, consider a faster processor too. I built my own machine, 1GHZ AMB Athlon T-Bird, 765MB RAM, and Poser whizzes along very nicely.

Hope this helps!

Dave :-)

Presumably latest whizzbang toy for mega bucks will solve all... No, I've got an Athlon 1800+ with 512MB DDRam. It renders real fast, but Poser loads very slow. :( But in my Runtime folder are more then 6 Gigabytes of stuff. ;)

Im on a 1,2 Gig Athlon with 512 mb. Think your 512 mb are enough,if you still use win98 or Win Me there is no sence in adding ram,win cant use it, or it will slow the computer down. And for your work , turn antialiasing and shadows off, and only turn it on for the final render.

Ready for a laugh? I'm using an iMac. One of the original iMacs. 233mhz, 270mb RAM, 4gb hard drive. VRAM pumped to 400mb. Can you say "long render times"? "Frequent lock-ups"? I knew you could. I miss my tricked out G4 from my dot.com days. sigh

Processor power, and platform even, are irrelevant (as we all know, being MAC users). They are invisible, they are special clothes for olde worlde emperors. What might be interesting is if someone is running Poser on a GeForce4 MX graphics doer. Especially with Poser 5 coming out (whoops).

You have enough ram, If Poser takes a long time loading, maybe your runtime folder is too big? I try to back up stuff I don't use to streamline it some. Try defragmenting your drive that helps. Test render small and without aliasing until you are ready for the final, and render while you sleep or watch TV!! I also have 512ram and run NT4 with a dual PII450 not the fastest thing but livable.

An ATA100 7200rpm drive will help loading from disk performance. esp. if you still have an older ATA33 5200rpm drive.

If you're getting ready to build...go for a dual Athlon with 3 GIGS of RAM. Yeah, it's overkill today, but you'll be good for the next 2 years. I built mine (1GIG Athlon, 1GIG RAM) 2 years ago and I'm still ok, but will build a new one in a few months or so.

Your mainboard will not support more then an UDMA 33 or if its a later chipset UDMA 66 hard drives. The ATA100 drive mentioned above will "work" but will slow down to 5400rpm and ATA66 speeds to be compatible with your system. Additionally, your board may be using the dated SDRAM RAM, not even the now dated PC100 type. SDRAM will only run at 8-10ms on a 33Mhz bus (circuit) so more RAM then you have might actually begin to degrade performance. Even more RAM with PC100 type RAM on a 66Mhz bus will not benefit you more then what you already have.

If you have one of the later chipsets and Boards you may have an AGP graphic adapter. However, I would suspect the graphic adapter is PCI format or even integrated on to the mainboard in which it cannot be changed. Even if your graphic adapter is AGP it is v1 compliant and will not support the new graphic adapters (video cards).

Bottom line is there is precious little you can do to increase the system performance via hardware. What you need to do is simply close anything which runs TSR (in the background). Although they may not be active they may take processing cycles simply to hold open. If your offline, then close any firewall, virus protection, additional function features like mouse control panels, scanner and CD writer controller software which often runs in the background. Doing things like that will help your stability and give max processor cycles to renders etc.

Hmmm, ATA100 on a slower bus will slow down the drive's rpm? Don't know about that. Slow down the data transfer definitely. My MoBo didn't support the higher speed either. I got a PCI ATA100 card for $29.95.

The PCI bus is even slower then the current FSB's of todays boards. Most people don't realize that the circuitry of the mainboards are segregated. The CPU, Memory, GPU constitute the FSB (frontside bus). It is normally set on current boards to the clock of the processor. The IDE bus is separate from the PCI bus. The IDE bus is a 64bit bus while the PCI bus is 32 bit. The ATA 100 7200 rpm drives on the IDE bus are 66Mhz @ 64 bit X 1.5 clock. The new buses on the boards are now 128 bit. You can certainly get a PCI ATA 100 adapter card, but your bios must accept booting from it. Most older bios will not accept a PCI card connected drive as its main boot drive. The card must have a bios rom that overrides the system bios in this regard. It doesn't always work with older systems. I depends upon the chipset and bio version used. If it works you will have a ATA 100 drive connected via 80 wire cable to a SCSI card sitting on a 32 bit bus running at 33Mhz x 3. The drive was designed to run on a 64 bit 66Mhz bus not a 32 bit 33Mhz bus. So of course it will be slower because it will default to 5400 rpm due to the 33Mhz 32 bit PCI bus. People incorrectly assume because the drive works, it means they are getting the actual performance they think they are. Most of the time they aren't. Frankly simply attaching the ATA100 harddrive to the normal IDE port with a standard IDE cable and simply running it as a UDMA 66 performance level drive is more stable and faster then using a cheap adapter card.