Just about to buy a new computer. The max is 2G. I was going to go for 1Gig and upgrade but I would lose the first G entirely if I did that. Why aren't puter sellers used to graphics people? I would like advice on this as the price differences are, needless to say, serious. As a new computer it will be running XP. And the porcessor is 2.4G. Emily

I upgraded to P4 with a gig of ram and the 128 mb GeForce and found that a lot of my rendering problems disappeared. I now surf the net, render in Poser and work on textures in at least two different applications with no problems. Before, if I was rendering anything mroe than Posette by herself, the lights went out on my PC.

2G might speed up your renders a little, but not by much, as poser renders are already quite speedy. It might help running poser and max and photoshop and deep paint all at the same time ( helps me anyway ) but unless you are doing complicated large renders in high tier graphics programs or plan to make abusive use of photoshop and 6000x6000 pixel textures, i think 1 Gig is sufficient for posers use. Save the money from the Gb of ram your not buying and get a higher grade graphics card instead, or get the ram and instead upgrading later, get a new software package to take advantage of all that extra memory.

forgot to ask, what format of memory and which bandwidth are you getting?

I highly doubt you will notice the difference in 1GB vs 2GB if your goal is to improve poser's performance. Instead, you may want to consider spending the money on a dedicated secondary hard drive for Poser. Its is a space hog and seem to causes lots of fragmentation...I need to defrag my poser drive twice as often as my main drive.

I'd second the motion for a hard drive dedicated to Poser. My 30GB is for Poser only, and my performance improved. Plus it's so much easier if you ever want to protect or backup your art or Poser installation.

Well, I've heard graphic cards-- beyond a GEforce 2 --dont help Poser. I do plan to use 4000 by 4000 hi-res textures and the figures that carry them, maybe more than one, maybe more than 2 in a scene. I would rather not, but textures keep going up an up in resolution, and even 3000 adds up. The PC comes with a 120Gig hard drive, I have an auxilary 120 Gig, but no appropriate firewire card to hook it to. I was planning on this machine being my Poser and Vue machine and my old machine at 1.2G mhz, 512RAM-- assuming it's survives it's latest meltdown-- would be my Photoshop machine. I have Poser on a 35G drive now and it's eating it like Ice Cream. But then again the old machine isn't running XP either. Not yet. My main complaints with it before the video card possibly died [I'm still waiting to hear the news] was that 512 was it's max in memory. And that's not enough. I don't want to be in that position again. On the other hand, it would be lovely to run MusicMatch with Poser. Emily

This is the ram 1024MB PC800 RDRAM (311-1772) I have no idea why the bandwidth should matter-- are you referring to internet? I have IDSL. And lousy transfer downstream. It's the only bandwidth available where I live at the edge of the copper wire limit. Emily

sorry, i was just referring to the RAM bandwidth (in this case, PC800) I asked because the type of RAM would greatly affect its price and we'd know how much of a difference you were talking about before recommending it. Have you considered looking for a DDR system instead? 2 Gb of DDR ram costs only slightly more than 1 Gb of RDRAM last time i looked but has no performance hits in poser.

The unit that takes DDR maxes at 1G. So the speed for RDAM is not going to help Poser any?? I'm not building my own, I'm going to Dell. I can't lift a computer let alone put it together. Nor can I give it three years in house service. The Video card is 64MB DDR NVIDIA GeForce3 TI 200 Graphics Card with DVI (320-0289)It's $400 more for the Titanium Ge4. And so far, I have not heard much about it being necessary or even used for either Poser, Bryce or Vue, the only progs that are likely to be affected. I dont use Max or Lightwave and am not likely to. Ah well, it will all depend on whether the old--little over a year!-- puter has lost a Video card or a motherboard. If the latter, the new one gets loaded to the brim and has an extra firewire card if I can fit it in. I hope it hasn't. But if I have to buy a new Video for it-- I may have to go to 1G just budget wise. Normally I would rather high-end it all the way, but this is such a high end, that I thought I would get some advice. Emily

Getting a better graphics card--faster or with more memory--is only going to help you in applications that support accelerated real-time previewing. Many 3D applications support the fast cards via DirectX or OpenGL, or both. Poser does not have this option however.
In all 3D rendering/modeling software, the power of your graphics card has NO EFFECT on things like raytracing times. Raytracing speed is primarily a measure of your computers CPU/FPU horsepower. 3D graphics cards are for realtime rendering of 3D, used primarily in games like Quake and 3D apps for preview rendering during the modelling and animating stages.
-Adam

This is where I get totally confused. 1.) "Getting a better graphics card--faster or with more memory--is only going to help you in applications that support accelerated real-time previewing. Many 3D applications support the fast cards via DirectX or OpenGL, or both. Poser does not have this option however." OK, so just what the heck is "accelerated real-time previewing? Is that the ability to see a fair representation of your render in the document window, even before it's rendered? This statement clearly states that some graphics cards suppor 3D applications. 2.) "In all 3D rendering/modeling software, the power of your graphics card has NO EFFECT on things like raytracing times." This statement might imply that graphics cards don't help 3D programs at all. Just what the heck is ray tracing? Is that what you see in the document screen before you render? Or is that the rendering process itself. Maybe you can help a really dumb person like myself, and answer this question. Will a "hot and powerful" graphics card help me with Poser and some other 3D graphics apps? Do you have a list of the ones that benefit and those who don't? Will a hot graphics card help update my document window? Will it help me render a "picture" faster?

Accelerated 3D previewing gives you the ability to work, while composing your scene, with fully texture-mapped 3D models at very fast frame rates. Computers without fast 3D graphics cards have to use some kind of software previewing, like Gouraud or Phong shading or simple color shading. Fully-textured previews can still be done without a 3D graphics card, but they tend to be very slow to refresh each time you move the models or the camera--especially if you have a lot of textures or a complex scene. A 3D graphics card has a high-speed processor (GPU--graphics processor unit) dedicated to realtime texture mapping, and this can be used by most mid-to-high-end 3D applications for nice quick fully-texutred previews. Again, Poser has never supported these cards, but hopefully 5.0 will.

Ray tracing is the process by which most 3D applications generate their "final" renders to a file on your hard drive. This is the comparitively long [non-realtime] process usually being referred to when someone mentions letting their scene "render". Ray tracing includes the rendering of shadows, reflections, refractions, and other computationally-intensive lighting effects that you don't get in your realtime preview. You may also hear speak of "Radiosity rendering" which is a more advanced type of ray tracing that adds support for objects to reflect, absorb and refract different colors of light differently.

Raytracing calculation is done by your computer's main processor, not by your graphics card. Graphics cards are only working on the realtime 3D display going right to your monitor, they don't get involved with processing data on your drive or in your system's/program's memory (RAM).

I'm happy with 512 ram. If I really want to speed up, I disable the swap drive and reboot and force the puter to use only RAM. When you do that, expect a black screen reboot when you ram out. So far, it hasn't happened to me and quite frankly, with the swap drive disabled, windoze doesn't slow down by forcing virtual memory when it really doesn't need it.

terminusnord, you obviously know your stuff, but I confess it's hard to understand you some of the time. Let's try to boil this down to simpler terms. 1.) I take it Poser won't benefit from a more powerful graphics card. Poser does all its work in the CPU. 2.) Which 3D or graphics programs currently will take advantage of a better graphics card? (examples, Bryce, PhotoShop, Vue?!) 3.) Graphics cards don't help rendering times. Probably a faster CPU or more memory are the only things that will.

I'm not an expert but I'm running a 1.8 Mhz (pentium 4) with 512 RAM and Poser works great. I can surf, pose, bryce and texture just fine.

Ron, you've got it right on points 1 and 3. As for #2, which programs support realtime 3D, I'm not familiar with anything other than what I've used/tried. I'm demoing Cinema 4D on a mac right now, and it does support openGL on my graphics card (Radeon 8500). I expect that all current 3D programs have this support by now. Poser is really an exception to the rule... it's behind this times in a lot of ways. -Adam

After reading what you all have, I think I may be doing something wrong. I have 1.1 GB RAM, a PIII 800 MHz processor, Poser is on its own Harddrive, yet when I'm rendering, I can't do anything else with my computer. I have an NVIDIA TNT2 Ultra video card. Am I the norm, or the exception?

I often run the following programs all at the same time: 1.) Poser 2.) ThumbsPlus 3.) PhotoShop 4.) Internet Explorer 5.) Corel Capture 6.) MS Word 7.) Outlook Express 8.) Dreamweaver 9.) SpamKiller I have a lowly Intel Celeron 533 mhz motherboard with an on-board video chip, 512MB of RAM. I run all the programs at once because I often create tutorials. I need to create the tutorial "in real time," as I do the procedures, capture the screenshots and put it all together. If you can only do one thing at a time, there appears to be something wrong... What operating system are you using? I use Windows XP Home Edition.

I'm also using XP home edition. I can run the programs at the same time, but its when I render anything in Poser that all my resources get tied up. I can't minimize it and run anything else while its rendering.

WEll to be technical, I can run other things. The Poser render just looks weird for a bit, and then it comes out ok. If the other programs are just running in the background, then things look fine.

Sorry if you have seen this before, but this is about the limit of what you can do with Poser with 768 Mb of RAM in Win 2000 (or I assume XP), while I sort of lost track I think there are about 12 Vickies, 9 Supermodel Vickies, 5 SMMVs, 1 gun, and some clothing and hair in it. So I'd say that while we always say "you can't be too thin, or have too much memory", 1GB should do you fine in Poser 4 with a proper O.S., which Win 95/98 ain't! I kept adding stuff till I slowed it down, this did render in a couple of minutes (I forget, maybe 5), incidently!

This render caused Windows XP to gripe and increase the virtual memory. I don't have as many characters, but the Lann hair and the DAZ Mansion Great Room have lots of detail in them. In the past, I've rendered 3 millennium figures, and *every* prop in that room, and Windows grumbled, but succeeded in rendering.