Hi fellas. I have a question please. How would Poser benefit from a Dual CPU computer ( total of 3.2GHZ ) and 512MB PC2100 DDR RAM?
Thanks.

Poser will generally only use one of the CPU's. As far as I can tell, it's not wired for multi-processor support. That said, if you're doing a long render or something you can let Poser eat one CPU and do something else with the other. I was doing multi-hour Python script runs and I could still do email, web troll, word process, etc on the second CPU while Poser chugged on the first. More RAM is always better. Right now it's so cheap I'd buy all you could.

It'd be able to render alot quicker. Suppposing both processors are contributing. Also w/the mem. it'd be able to use full tracking w/textures, w/o as much skipping as on a slower sys w/less memory. Do you have a dual processor motherboard?

Thanks for the speedy replies. Yes I just built myself a dual CPU computer under $1000. I salvaged some parts (floppy, sound, modem, mouse and keyboard) from my old Pentium III 700MHZ system. I used the Tyan S2460 dual Athlon MP motherboard (awesome motherboard, though it can only go as high as the Athlon MP 1900 CPU at 1.6GHZ). I bought it at pricewatch.com for $166. Also I threw in an ATI Radeon 8500 128MB Video Card. Hopefully I'll upgrade to ATI FireGl 8800 in future ;-) I saw it for $456 some where at pricewatch website. My Poser4 was installed in the old system, but I thought it could benefit from the dual cpu setup. However, I also use Animation master and several other packages that would benefit from the setup. I wish and hope Curious Labs would add multiprocessor support to Poser in future :-)

Thanks very much for all your input:-)

right now poser does not support Dual processors or any hardware accleration. but it had better in poser 5 with this collision detection and strand Based hair with raytracing!!

I've been using poser for awhile and have not noticed any imporvement using my dual system. However, it is very useful for when I am working in both poser and max simultaneously. Like jbrugion said, it ont help poser much, but it sure is more convenient. If you expect big jumps in performance though, you may be disappointed. thinking you have a "total" of 3.2 GHz is quite erroneous. Dual processors dont work quite that way. More RAM is always good. If you are going to be working in Poser and Animation and who knows what else, then I believe at least 1 Gig is the current standard. Go to crucial.com and buy all your motherboard can fit. Upgrading your video card wont have much of an effect on Poser at this point. The one you have now is already far above the best specs it will ever use.

As others noted already, Poser 4's renderer will not take full advantage of the two CPUs. It is true however that a dual proc feels more responsive under heavy loads, so you can work as usual on it while having a rendering task in the background. For batch rendering outside Poser, you could of course start two instances of e.g. BMRT and let them make full use of your two CPUs. Concerning RAM: There is no such thing as too much RAM ;) (where everything above are my personal impressions and do not reflect the opinion of my employer, as usual)

I'm with wolf359 in my hope that Poser 5 will have dual processor support. With all the stuff that Curious Labs is adding, Poser 5 can sure benefit from dual CPU support.