Its a shame CL could not afford to add hardware acceleration to poser5 Ive looked at the minimum hardware requirements of 3 major 3D programs for the macintosh ALL of them offer cloth simulation, fur and collision detection system in one form or anotherand Liquid Simulation and particle systems and radiosity rendering.( not offerd in poser5) and ALL three have hardware accleration Lightwave3D minimum MAC System: Power Macintosh Processor (G3 or higher recommended) Mac OS 9 Mac OS X * 384 MB of available RAM for Mac OS 9 128 MB of available RAM for Mac OS X *Mac OS X is recommended All systems require 32 MB Available hard drive space, CD-ROM for installation, and a minimum screen resolution of 800 x 600 pixels. LightWave 3D includes a CD-ROM full of license-free objects, images, textures and scenes. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ MAYA minimum MAC system: ANY MAC G4 System, 450 MHz and faster Graphics Card ATI Radeon Mac Edition OS 10.0.4 ATI Rage 128 Pro OS 10.0.4 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Cinema4DXL7.3 Minimum MAC System: Basicially ANY power macintosh system G3 or higher recommended for Dynamics and radiosity rendering ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Poser5 recommended systrem: 500 MHZ G4 700 MHZ or higher reccomended NO graphics hardware assistance I think poser users(especially animators) need to be prepared for long processing times for these new coth/hair simulations

Once Poser 5 for mac is out, I honest still see myself rendering in Cinema 4D. I have a G4 800Mhz 512MB RAM and I don't run into much trouble rendering in cinema. Poser on the other hand.. yikes. I give it everything I've got and a few large textures makes it crap out telling me it can't find the texture files, and leaving me with all-white figures. it sounds like P5 is not going to be much of an improvement over P4 efficiency-wise, but I hope OS X memory manangement works in its favor. -Adam

I'm wondering if the cloth sim will work the same as on 3dsmax, it calculates all the deformations & collisions before you render anything, but it can be really slow on complicated cloth meshes. Naked vicky in a temple with a sword isn't going to go away just yet. Rob

Last time I went to buy more RAM, the clerk at the computer store tried to dissuade me. He told me that he uses 3DS Max and he only has 256 MB of RAM. Why the heck should I need 512 for Poser? He tried to give me a bootleg copy of 3DS Max instead of selling me the RAM. Crazy.... Disclaimer Department: Name of the compter store withheld for obvious reasons. This story is true. I turned him down. I still value Poser 4 more than my left leg. This is not a slam against Poser.

yeh maya might say it runs on that spec but try working with in on that spec LOL.....running it and using it are 2 different things :o)...Steve

From what I've seen, two things come to mind: 1) Poser, even Poser 5 is a huge bargain by comparison... folks who buy the full-blown versions of Maya, 3DS Max, or Lightwave also are able to purchase a monster Alienware-style box to run it on as a dedicated machine. Poser 5 doesn't run hardware acceleration because CL knows that most Poser users don't have a GeForce2 or better for video, nor a whole lot of machine to play with in the first place. 2) A 256MB stick of RAM is way cheaper than a brand new Radeon/GeForce card, which most Poser users would be forced to purchase if Poser came out as a pure 3D-accel proggie. Even us RDRAM/Rambus-using slobs can save more money that way. Finally, Steve is right. I mean, the minimum machine required for WinXP is something like a PII-300 or so... but it runs like a wounded snail through a bed of wet wallpaper paste on those specs. Now try loading a program on it >:) /P

I am waiting for the OSX version of the cinema hosting plugin before i buy because poser5's new render engine will be slower than cinema's. and wont offer any particle or liquid simulation systems. c1rcle: yes the collsions will have to be calculated before you render anything just like the dynamic/collision engines of Lightwave and cinema 4dXL only it will force you to do the processing one ONE processor. which is a shame because the next generation of super boxes from APPLE and Intel/AMD will likely have more than two processors Cinema support up to 16 processors. Kupa bragged that he did single render of a strand Based hair scene in 6 minutes Great!!..... for a still but an eight second animation at that rate will take 24 hours to render!! Assuming no other render intensive surfaces materials in the scene. and not countin the physics calculation times BEFORE any rendering is started. let the fun begin:-)

For P5 most people will probably be expecting to use high-poly count figures 'straight out of the box', wheras in the case of 3D apps it could be argued that they can still be used with low poly count models. This may explain why hardware accelleration wasn't implemented, as the advantages do decrease as the polycount rises. There's nothing particularly binding about minimum/recommended specs anyway, they just tend to reflect the current minimum spec of hardware on the market (and possibly what the software was developed on) so it's to be expected that software released some time ago will quote lower specs than the newer releases. So long as the OS is reasonably solid, there's virtually no actual lower limit. In terms of rendering CL went for a solution which is based primarily on a reyes type scanline renderer. Consider that probably 95% of feature films and animated TV that has been seen in the last 5 years uses this technology, it has a lot in terms of speed and detail to commend itself over pure raytracing. The disadvantage is that it is relatively difficult to implement some things like radiosity and caustics. Firefly does use secondary raytracing for reflections and refraction, and possibly to eliminate the use of shadow maps, but if you want (in the future) to see raytracing benefits, expect to pay the price, especially in terms of render times. Bill

recently I've been rendering poser stuff in Bryce to see how slow poser5 could get, anyone who's used bryce a lot should not be at an advantage anyway. Rob

oops that should read "anyone who's used bryce a lot should be at an advantage" :) Rob

Hang on though, Poser 5's the best excuse I've had to upgrade, even the chief fairy's agreeable.... What's the betting that the next Poser cliche will be the Marilyn Monro trick skirt shot.... in a temple of course... with lots of explosions... after which, for the more discerning, she'll do a handstand, ahh the possibilities...

Where do you get the idea of the 500MHz G4 from? There are no system requirements for the Mac version of Poser 5 posted on the CL Product pages.

in some cases some 3d apps give you the choice to render in software or hardware mode, so poser5 could have had that option, just to cover all their bases.also i'm not to much familiar with the details of python scripting ,but would it not be at least possible for someone to develop a plugin of sorts to enable hardware acceleration? --criticom--

I'm with you, Wolf. "Radeon/GeForce card, which most Poser users would be forced to purchase if Poser came out as a pure 3D-accel proggie" - Um, no. Speaking of graphics acceleration, I'm on a 1.3 GHz Athlon with 512MB DDR Ram and use a tnt2 32MB card. I can pass all the 3D benchmarks with no problem and have never had a problem running any new games that take advantage of 3D. Anyone with a 32 MB card or better (I've only had experience with nvidia and ati) would benefit from 3D acceleration. Nothing that I own runs faster in "software mode".

I love how people are already pointing out the shortcomings of a program that isn't even out yet. Who knows, all the opinions may well be right but why don't we just wait and see. in any case it's likely that it is too late for changes. perhaps the new software is more efficiant then those older programs.

Personally I think everyone should just get the new mover and render everything in Vue:) Thats what I plan on doing, I'm just hoping that e-on will be upgrading everything so dynamics..etc will work:) Together you have a pretty much complete animation package at (with the upgrade deal) under $500 and Vue renders like a speed demon most of the time. Brian

All this talk of HW acceleration reminds me of WinME poblems causing Vue4 and HW acceleration to guarantee that I would loose some work. Luckily, with win2k, I can count on Vue behaving reasonable (now if MS stupid Browser and Media player would just go away, and quit reminding me I need to up date them) Netherworks is right, though, that the acceleration should be switchable. If users had the power to use it, they would be able to do so. I still don't use the Vue 4 acceleration after I get too many polygons in a scene. After a certain point, the machine spends way to much time calculating stuff (and ignoring mouse clicks) Very frustrating. eric

I'm amazed at Posers "software" renderer. Compareing poser with maya shouldnt happen. I look at poser as one of many tools to use along with others and find it easy to mix up. Otherwords- you can open poser files in all the programs mentioned thanks to CL- Lightwave, Cinima, and I here Maya.

What's the cost to CL? They have already put the OSX on the back-burner and have already lost the excitemnt of the new version release forever. Impulse buyers (like me) will see the MAC version released when the "bugs" will be the dominant post of the day (hope not). As for taking advantage of the graphics cards, I saw where Nvidia and ATI are willing to work with software developers to help them code to take advantage of the cards capabilities. That's in their best interest. Perhaps CL IS working on this and that's why the MAC version will be released later. With the introduction of QuartzExtreme (in Jagwire), rumors of up-comming HyperTransport/RapidIO and interconnect technologies and with the purchase of Raycer,RAYZ, Shake (and others) Apple will be making a push into the 3D/Hollywood studio market "soon". They aleady have the 2D area locked-up with the ProTools line and Steve loves Hollywood. CL would be smart to take advantage of Apples lead. Everybody else does!