I'm looking to upgrade my machine and since Intel is not putting dual processor capable Pentium 4's out I am either stuck with PentIII 1000's, Xeons (=$$$$$$) or trying a dual Athalon MP. Anyone using a dual Athalon box with Poser and a GeForce series card? I remembered that when the GeForce's first came out the AMD CPU motherboards had a lot of problems compared to the intel chipsets. I need dual CPU's for what I'm doing but I'd like to get the fastest possible CPU's and have an upgrade path built in if possible. TIA

Attached Link: http://www.xicomputer.com

I believe those are Pentium 4 Xeons (which carry a bigger price tag). The Intel Site says they're not making dual vanilla (non-Xeon) Pentium 4's. Pentium 4's and Athalons are in the $200-300 range, Xeons start there are go upward. Also the motherboards for Xeons tend to be a bit pricier. If you want to dream big, try http://www.the3dshop.com/ . We got a couple of their machines for my day job work. Dual Xeons with Wildcat cards. They absolutely rip. Of course, with a base sticker price of $6K ......

I've gat a Dual Athlon - Xp 1700's with a gig of RAM and an Elsa Synergy 2000 Vid card. Poser runs nicely on the machine but doesn't really take advantage of the dual processor configuration. Also, to my knowledge most to the Poser rendering is done in software rather than hardware (somebody correct me if I'm wrong!!). The reason that I built the duallie was totally for Vue D'Esprit performance. That software really screams on my machine since it does use both processors.

Yeah, Poser 4 doesn't do dual, maybe in Poser 5 ? I like two CPU's because while Poser or another app is crunching and eating up one CPU I can still work on the second CPU. I used to always go to Intel but now I'm wondering what dual Hammer CPU's would be like :-)

The Poser renderer is coded directly into the application. From what I understand Poser4 internal code is a pretty scary. I guess the renderer was custom written and doesn't take advantage of any hardware at all. What makes this alarming is that to use a new renderer the core program has to be rewritten from scratch. Or at least that is what I have been told. I think that is why Poser4 and ProPack's renders are the same as Poser3 for the most part. Anton

Attached Link: http://www.blender3d.com

Remember, one of the considerations of writing a program that behaves the same on Mac and Windows (no platform bashing, please) is that the graphics algorithms either need to be hardcoded or reliant on an outside standard.

When P3 was written OpenGL wasn't as ubiquitous as today; the reason it was even possible to port Blender to an iPaq handheld was because it has OpenGL support. This isn't to say that CL's going to go this route, just to point out what they'd need to do to wean Poser off custom render engines.

Hi, AFAIK, Poser4 is uniprocessor only and makes no use of the features of any GFX card except as a simple display device. For Poser4 processor "speed" is all that counts, as well as RAM size, I think Poser may even have problems with advanced video cards, (driver conflicts) I've seen a few threads about it. Poser5 however threatens to change all that, including even gasp GFX card support, shaders, the works. Whether it'll see the light of day this side of Christmas is another matter... Athalons are both good and cheap, and unless they're running against code tweaked for the P4's new architecture beat it hands down in most "real world" tests. But I doubt you're buying a Dual Athalon just to run Poser, right? :) later jb