Being a "geek" that builds his own (and others') systems, I find that 3D hardware and its rapid advancement to be fascinating, and somewhat confusing to say the least. However, with the advent of the "computer on a board" video adapters (ie, video adapters that have more cpu power/memory than the TRS-80s and other early computers I used), I find it difficult to grasp the advantages. For instance, I have a high-end GeForce 2 video card (Asus V7700 Deluxe; yes, I know it's "old" by now) that has its own processor and 64MB of memory. However, even though I shut down many of the background apps, etc, when using Poser or other 3d intensive applications, the system can sometimes come to a crawl - almost to the point of hanging. The rest of the system: CPU: AMD 800MHz Athlon T-Bird Memory: 512MB PC133 DIMM MB: Asus A7V with latest VIA drivers HDD: 45GB IBM Deskstar somethingorother Video Driver: nVidia v29.42 So, I would gather that at 800Mhz plus the GeForce's processor combined with the system memory (512MB) plus the Gefore's memory (64MB) [Total 576MB], this should still be a viable system to run 3D applications, etc on. However, it seems "sluggish" when rendering in Popser. I guess the main questions are: 1) How much of an impact on performance do these "advanced" video adapters really provide? 2) Would it make sense to upgrade the video adapter for 3D applications over upgrading the system for overall performance gains, vice versa, or the whole shabang? 3) Is there some utility available that can test the video adapter's capabilities (independant of the OS and other hardware) and generate a report so you can see if the card itself is functioning to its optimum potential? 4) Any suggestions from the experienced 3D graphics pros here on what would be the optimum settings to use in the nVidia driver's properties to maximize the overall system configuration? Thanks for your time.

let me try :) 1 - it depends how grafic apps are using the 3d card. poser doesn't use that much - though it gained somewhat of performance as i changed from the same card you have to msi's gforce4, but mostly due to "brute force" of the card. if poser would utilize opengl or direct3d, the impact would be substantial. 2 - again it depends what 3d apps you are using. i'm working daily with max, and performance improved :) 3 - there are lot of them, do a search in google on "3d benchmark 2001". 4 - sorry, i won't dare. defaults are working mostly pretty good. you can always save your settings and change them if you don't like them...

1- most gaming video adapters like the geforce you are referring to are mostly used for real time shading and polygon pushing , usually optimized for direct 3d. For games, you would notice a tremendous difference, but for most 3d apps the difference isnt as noticeable unless the app was programmed to take avantage of that card. Other workstation graphics cards like the quadro and wildcat are primarily openGL cards, and would have a noticeable difference in 3d apps because they are programmed to provide features specifically related to those apps, but you would still notice very little diference in a program like poser, ehich is not designed to take advantge of the card. 2. For actually using the program, you 3d video ard might make the actual modelling and working in a shaded viewport faster, but for rendering, compositing, dynamic effects, and computing lighting and animation, your processor and ram would still be the largest denominator to determine perfomance. Your 3d card would make your work easier, but by itelf will not greatly improve overall performance. 3. Any benchmarking software can do this, some are even free. go to a computer magazine site like pc world, tomshardware.com, sharkeys.com, or 3d world and ee which benchmarks they use. 4. Check the manufacturers driver specifcations to see if theirs are based on the reference drivers nvidia provides or if theirs are optimized to take advantage of card specific features. If they are reference drivers, you can check the nvidia webite for specifications on the drivers they mke and use it to determine your best settings. If using 3rd party drivers, they should tell you what the difference are on the site that provides the drivers. The default settings are usually pretty good though, as a cards driver can make or break the card that is using it and competition is good enough that optimized drivers will determine if you mak money or not.

You might go to povray.org and read their faq concerning graphics cards. Basically they say that the floating point operations used in raytracing do not use 3d hardware. The best way to improve performance in rendering is a faster processor and more memory.

Attached Link: POVRAY FAQ: 9.4.2 How do I increase rendering speed?

Thanks for the info everyone. (The link is to POVRAY's advice concerning hardware for 3D graphic apps. Obviously written from a POVRAY viewpoint, but I presume equally applicable to other 3D apps as well.) This has proven to be very enlightnening indeed. I was under the impression that the advanced adapters would actually improve all 3D operations, regardless of the application. I thought the 3D drivers/hardware and OS/system hardware "communicate" with each other and whenever something "graphical" was to be considered, the bulk of the work was offloaded to the graphics adapter to handle; pushing only the necessary load back to the cpu/cache/memory/etc, when and as necessary. Since I usually finish games within about 30-40 hours, I have more or less stopped buying games and relying upon "hand-me-downs" from those I know that *have to have* the latest and greatest when they grow tired of them. Had you not offered this advice, I would have most likely jumped onto the latest advanced adapter hoping it would make a difference. Apparently, this is money best spent elsewhere within the system. So, for my money, I guess a serious system overhaul (and a long-awaited one I could not "justify" before) is in order. Thanks again and happy rendering. :0) === One more question, probably very newbie-like too: I checked the info on a few of the images that I have made so far, and they seem to hover at about 15k-30k unique colors. I usually have my monitor set for True Color (32Bit) mode at 1280x1024. I suspect that Poser comes nowhere near that and I could possibly lower the mode and/or the resolution to "increase" the render speed of Poser. I would presume that by stepping down the mode/resolution, I would gain back some cpu cycles used in displaying images on the monitor. Would this most likely be correct?

In my mind, we don't have the full picture here. What operating system do you use? That can make a world of difference.

Windows 98 SE. I have seen no need to upgrade to this point.

no, you won't, or at least you won't notice. if you render in 1280x1024 it'll take approx. 4 times longer then 640x480(512). you can speed up the rendering if you keep textures resolution (or size) lower and set your shadow maps from shadow casting lights down. and of course, stock vicky takes longer to render then stock posette.

As many others here have mentioned, gains in rendering speed for Poser can be made by tweaking or improving your processor, memory and harddrive. Additionally, for PC users, somewhat significant gains can be earned by switching to Windows XP. WinXP has a vastly improved memory manager that helps processing through the pipeline. Specifically, if you have at least 512MB of memory, you should see some fantastic gains in regular PC use. At present all consumer-level video cards provide no assistance to the actual rendering of images, only the pre-viz. Consumer video cards provide no specific benefits to non OpenGL or DirectX apps (which includes Poser). However, this is about to change. Both ATI and nVidia's next generation of cards (and to some degree this generation) will actually be able to offload the rendering from the CPU and perform it in the on-card graphics processing unit (GPU). Then, we should see some significant improvements in rendering time. However, my guess is that this will provide no benefit whatsoever through Poser v5. So the short answer is, looking at your specs, upgrade to WinXP, and upgrade your processor to a 1.4 Athlon (it should fit in your motherboard), saving you from having to go out and buy a new motherboard/processor combo. The 1.4MB are actually pretty cheap these days, and can be had for less than $100 US. - Ray Yamka

The color depth of 32bit you chose in your display driver doesnt influence your final picture at all. It just means that your graphic card sends the signal with 4 Bytes (32 Bit) to your monitor, it doesnt care wether your image has a 8 Bit, 24Bit pr 48Bit color depth. Poser only renders in 24 Bit. Im not sure, wether a 24Bit mode is faster than a 32bit mode, as for 32bit the driver sends two doublewords (each 16 Bit) of information. (might not be correct in this point). But this will only influence your display speed, not your rendering speed.

To the best of my knowledge, XP still has some serious issues regarding drivers and support for some devices; at least that is what I hear from people I converse with on the subject. I take it that the sentiments here are the opposite? BTW, I heard the same hype over every single MS OS release after 98SE. However, there are some you never hear mention of again; ie, W2K Pro, ME, etc. In fact, a colleague I used to work with was a Beta Tester for MS and hyped up every new release higher than the next, only to be constantly changing his OS back and forth as problems arose. I just want to make sure that this will be a progressive vs a regressive move.

as stated above, the resolution you render at will increase rendering time, but your color display will only effect how you see the image, not how it renders. If you set your display depth to 256 colors and render a scene in poser, the render will look pretty bad to you, but will still take as long to render as if your display was set at 32 bit and if someone else looks at it, it will look totally different to them because it still was rendered using the full color scheme and displays on their system showing all the colors ( try to translate that if you can :P ) The number of colors in your scene that are rendered is depermined by what textures you use and the lighting for yor scene. And what size texture and how many colors the texture has will effect your rendering times.

also as i said before, if you have a workstation opengl card and software designed to take advantage of it, or a really powerful gaming card, then it will indeed tak some of the load of working in the program, so if you do get a major system overhaul and have the software, a good card is a sound investment, but for poser youd be wasting cash. And it wont effect your end result in any case, just make the actual work process faster and easier ( modelling in full tracking with real time lightning and full texture shading in softimage instead of bounding boxes and wireframe, for example .)

"I would presume that by stepping down the mode/resolution, I would gain back some cpu cycles used in displaying images on the monitor."

This is actually where you might notice a difference with a good video card, as your display refresh and color depth are handled by the adapter and takes the load from the cpu. If you have a good video card, you will notice absolutely no performance hit whatsoever between using a 16 bit display and a 32 bit display (in fact, your GeForce2 is actually optimized for high resolutions and will display 32 bit at 1280 x 1024 as well if not better than 16 bit.) This only effects your display and not your 3d app.
for the time being, i would have to agree with Ray that your current hardware is fairly sufficinet and that a simple processor upgrade for yor board is your best bet short of getting an entirely new rig. Of course, if you do plan on getting an entirely new rig, then thats a whole new topic.

oh, forgot to mention too, that running win98 does indeed severely limit your memory handling capabilities, your 512 mb of ram is seriously being underused , guaranteed. Most people who complain about MS OS's do so simply because it has become cool to be anti microsoft and not because of any serious problems. While there are naturally problems with most os's due simply to the SIZE that an operating system has, both win2k and winXP are very stable systems and both based on a proven NT kernel. This is especially true for resource intensive applications such as 3d graphics. Most problems from winXP stem from old or buggy drivers, not the operating system itself, and i see nothing in your current hardware configuration that would have troubles with winXP or 2K, so any troubles would stem from any software you are using. You can use the upgrade compatibility checker before installing XP to see if any of your current software is unsupported. Most software can be run in compatibility mode also.

These serious drivers issues you are referring to was mostly for beta versions of XP, and have since been corrected as 3rd party vendors released new drivers that were designed to work with XP.

There are other complaints of spyware in XP, these mostly refer to microsofts asinine insistance that people want automatic updates for everything and want to know as little as possible about what is happening to your computer, but the features they complain most about can be disabled with little trouble, its just hidden from common view, anybody who tweaks their system can remove it easily.

The final complain abot XP is the authorization process, but it is not that disimilar from the methods used by other companies, especially 3d app companies, used to try to prevent warez. It is agravating as hell, but has become virtually a necessary evil as warez use skyrockets. As long as yu have a legal copy of winXP, there should be no problems, the process is no nearly as bad as all the devils advocates claim. Of course, the people that shout the loudest are usually the peple who steal virtually everything on their computer to begin with.

As a final note, avoid ME at all costs. AT ALL COSTS You would be better off throwing your computer out the window.

I would second everything darkphoenix said regarding the OS. Personally, I use 2000 Professional (which I actually won in a Microsoft contest :-) It has been the most stable OS I have used. I would suggest upgrading to 2000/XP, a faster Athlon and max memory you can afford. Putting 2000/XP on a new drive if possible, will make for an easier upgrade and you can still run 98 as a dual-boot. I just saw an 80GB IBM drive at TigerDirece (I believe) for $100. With this package, you should be ready for Poser 5 or the next great gaming opus.

CyberStretch, I aplogize, but I remain quite confused. You describe yourself as a computer geek, and you build your own computers (as I do). Yet you say Windows XP is basically unreliable and you don't see the need to use Windows XP? I used the "pre-release" version (you know the one where you pay so you can test it). I never had a single problem with Windows XP. I bought XP Home Edition, and never had a problem. I have a pitiful Intel Celeron 533 mhz motherboard with a built-in video chip, 512MB of RAM, etc ... I have no problems rendering, or doing anything. This whole issue of video cards can be confusing. It almost seems to me that more sophisticated and powerful video cards really benefit people who play games. Maybe some high-end graphic apps benefit as well. Poser currently uses your CPU for all that work, and Poser 5 won't change in that regard.

crisjon: "You describe yourself as a computer geek, and you build your own computers (as I do). Yet you say Windows XP is basically unreliable and you don't see the need to use Windows XP?" From the reports I have heard and information I have read from people actually using it, including those who purchased OEM systems with the OS pre-installed, it seems that XP is still rampant with issues. Up to this point W98SE has done what I needed it to do. Therefore, why go out and buy the latest version of Windows (which seems to have ramped up it OS productivity over the past couple of years producing several "variations" to charge different price points), when there is no real benefit to doing so? Upgrading for upgrading's sake, IMHO, is a waste of time, effort, and money if it provides little to no incentive for doing so.

On another note, the responses here was just enough to get me to whip out the credit card and order some new components. Do you think Poser will run better on: * AMD XP 2100+ * Asus A7V333 * 512MB PC2700 DDR * Windows XP Pro :0) Now that I can "justify" doing the upgrades I will be elated to receive my new components within a couple of days and retire this system to W2K server duties to replace an old 300 Celeron POC. When my GF asks where I got such a crazy idea, I will tell her you told me to do it. :0)

yes, poser should shine quite nicely on that system. Id go for 1024 G instead of 512 M myself, but i dont know your budget. 512MB chips of PC2700 are pretty expensive still, more than double the price for the 256MB chips. Other than that, an excellent selection.

The 512MB is just a start, the mobo can hold up to 3GB, but the 1GB PC2700 DDRs are still a tad outta my price range. Give it a few months. ;0)

CyberStretch, I'm not sure who you've been talking with. The majority of the feedback I've received through my own contacts and here at Renderosity has been very favorable concerning Windows XP. In fact I can't remember the last time anyone mentioned a serious problem with Windows XP.

heh, mac users, and "micro$oft" bashers are mentioning "serious" problems with XP all the time, as well as the "trojan os" doomsayers. Its all a matter of determining if the problem is XP or the bias of the person.

There were indeed several articles and anecdotes reporting problems with XP, but that was at least six moths ago, if not longer. Six months in this industry is a small lifetime. It also pays to consider the relative validity of individual experiences. You can't judge an OS based on the responses of a few people, there are simply too many variables in terms of hardware and software, not to mention the user's level of experience. What works beautifully for many people is still going to give someone fits, often due to one or two things like a video card with old drivers, an anti-virus program, dll versions or any number of factors. Also keep in mind that for "jounralists," 'OS full of bugs" is better copy than 'Few problems reported'. Sounds like you will have a killer setup CyberStretch, though unless you are doing heavy duty networking I would have gone for XP Home and the new HD.

lmckenzie, I have an 80GB waiting to be installed and I do have a W2K server. Having DSL, I do have a home network and, hopefully someday, I will have a "server farm" with all the "old" systems I have running Linux, etc. The only problem is that I have never wired up a house for networking, plus I do not own the house I live in. :0) As for the "XP Debate": Each individual has to make up their own mind based upon the available information. Although your experiences have been apparently different from those of the people I converse with, I have gone with the majority here and purchased XP to give it a whirl.

With some CAT-5 cable, connectors and a crimper shouldn't be too hard. Get it from somplace where they'll show you how to do it. Maybe your landlord will let you do it if you're not too messy. It would enhance the value of the house when you move. You'll should have enough extra strands to hook up more phones also. Laying it along/behind the baseboards might be the easiest but I'm a rank amateur so ask for suggestions. There are phone line and power line networks but they may not fit your needs. Wireless has come down quite a bit as well. Sounds exciting. Have fun.

while they are supposedly similar in nature, i have noticed that people usually have more problems with xp home than xp pro, so if you can afford pro, go with it instead. If not, you can set up networking with home the same as you can with pro, you just dont receive the same advanced file security features and , from my experience, a more suspect system.

OK, I'm glad that CyberStretch has seen the value of Windows XP. I haven't seen any reports that say Windows XP Home Edition causes any more problems than Windows XP Pro. If someone doesn't need the advanced features of Windows XP Pro, they are better served by spending that extra $100 or so on hardware, Poser stuff, or whatever tickles their fancy.

i havent seen any real reports either, i was just stating my personal observances from interactions with other people who have contacted me with problems. I always go off of personal experiences rather than magazine articles when it comes to a recomendation like that. Its also why i mentioned his ability to afford it. naturally you want to get your other hardware and program stuff before worrying about getting the more expensive of the 2.

crision, I will let you know "the value of XP" once I get it and successfully have it installed... :0)

i havent seen any real reports either, i was just stating my personal observances from interactions with other people who have contacted me with problems." I think you're being hung up on semantics here. By "real reports," I'm talking about any form of "feedback" or report, whether it be from "the media," personal contacts, etc. In my long experience, computer magazines provide an invaluable resource of information. Yes, I have developed the ability to tell the hype from real solid info. I have the same ability when it comes to talking to people (even those who call themselves "experts.")