About six months ago I was working on a Celeron 600MHz with about 128 meg of memory. I was a happy.. I remember boasting to my friends that my systems was fast. And for what I used it for... it was. Then it happened.. I bought Poser. Suddenly 600MHz was not enough.. so I purchase an Athlon 1333 with 512Meg, 60Gig drive... I actually bought the parts and built it my self. So for a couple of months I was happy again. But now I find myself back where I started.. 6 months ago.. I NEED MORE SPEED!!!!. but I can't afford it.. So here's the question.... Has anyone noticed a difference in render times upgrading from 512Meg to 1024meg? running windows XP. or Has anyone built them selves a dual cpu system.. do you get twice the performance? Nick

I went from a p200 with 64Mb running Win98SE to a p4 2.0Ghz with 1024Mb 80gig hard drive with XP and the difference is amazing a really simple render with 1 character and a small texture would take minutes to hours on the old machine now it takes me longer to set up the render than it does to render it, only the 1 cpu tho I'm dropping hints to my wife at the moment

Im on a 1200 mhz athlon with 512 mb and Win XP. And i think it fast enough( faster would be better but i wait till the really fast systems get cheaper) Dont think adding more ram would really increase rendering speed. And a second cpu, the program andthe os have to support a second cpu, and poser doesnt :-(( What can help is, switch of in the renderoptions all the things that slow rendering down( shadows,tansparencie) till you really need it for the final render

Interesting... I thought if the operating system supported dual CPUs (XP professional) then poser wouldn't care or know the difference.. the operating systems would just share the load between both CPUs. Because getting dual CPUs is not that expensive if you do it yourself.. The athlon xp 1300 can't be more than $175... I shouldn't complain but I do.. I always seem to find new ways to push my system.. complex renders are quite fast, 30 seconds (1280x960 shadows,bump) is not bad at all... But now I'm working on animations..at 640x480.. 24fms..a ten second clip... now that's 240 frames.. 20 - 30 minutes.. to render. Too long!!! Nick

I've read in previous posts that a dual system won't help out Poser but can improve your "productivity" if you're using other programs in the background, like Photoshop. The processing need to power those other applications won't steal from Poser. One fella even said he could burn a CD while Poser was rendering.

Unfortunately, speed in P4 is almost entirely a function of your CPU (provided you've taken ronknight's suggestions). XP might give you a little boost, as it allegedly manages memory better than Win 9x (How could it not?) But maybe P5 will take advantage of video cards, etc...some day...

I think you might want to invest a bit in video memory... i.e. a video card with more video RAM. At a certain point, you don't get as much as you put in for normal RAM, at that point, increasing Video RAM should help speed up your renders tremendously. The down point is that video RAM is so much more expensive and not usually something you could just stick in the computer. You usually have to swap out the whole video card.

In my general 3D modeling/rendering experience, RAM makes all the difference. For example, renders (in Bryce/Rhino) that took 20 hours to render with 128MB became 6 at 256MB and 1-2 at 512MB. I upgraded today to a dual 2GB Xeon w/2GB RAMBUS, so I'm thinking maybe the picture will render before I even know what I wanna model :-) Note I have not done any comparisons with Poser - yet.

Thanks for the good advice, every little bit helps.. I just wonder if 10 years from now, when I'm rendering on Poser 9 on my P9 12000Mhz system, will I still be complaining that things aren't fast enough? Knowing myself chances are, I will. I'm sure I'll still be posting on renderosity trying to figure out how I can squeeze the last MHz out of what ever system I'll be on then. I do look forward to 10 years from now.. Just imagine the power we'll have at our fingertips.. But I guess for now I'll manage and dream a little. Thanks again Nick

"When was the last time you defragged your hard drives, or rebooted your computer. That can make a difference." Defrag - yes. Defrag can work wonders on sluggish systems. Reboot - not really needed if you use XP or even 2k. Both have far superior memory management to that in Win98/Me (if you can even call it management in those). After 2 weeks of continuous operation - playing games, using photoshop, poser, etc etc, Poser still kicked out high res renders as fast as it did on the fresh bootup. XP and 2k were designed for use in places that cant or dont want to reboot when using system/memory intensive applications. 1024RAM will make a noticeable difference if you render images that cause Windows to resort to a swap file. Surprisingly enough, it doesnt take much to do it either! Get a memory manager like Cacheman and watch the memory utilization meter when you render. An image with a single Mill character using high res bumps and maps uses a fairly large amount of RAM (and swap if needed). Unfortunately I cant remember the numbers off hand. Correct Ron - Video ram/fillrate/T&L processor/etc, anything to do with the video card other than 2D output basically, does nothing for Poser at all.