"Poser 5 will have a hardware rendering engine- and perhaps VUE 5"...unfortunatelly no. POSER 5's hybrid scanline/raytracing engine is a SOFTWARE renderer.

A graphic card is totally useless for rendering. It only affects the "on-screen" display shading. The reason is simple : your CPU cannot access the data loaded in the graphic card's RAM, neither use its GPU a second rendering unit. A graphic card will provide faster screen refreshing rates, that's all it can do !

But even for display shading, the graphic card only "draws" polygons calculated by the 3D software. Calculating the polygons is the most intensive part of the job, so if you experience crawling display speed, the only solution is to increase the speed of the CPU.

Getting a more powerful graphic card will not make a big difference. The display speed will increase by only 20 or 30 %, but if you double the CPU clock speed, the display shading will be 200 % faster. Moreover, in most cases, 3D softwares doesn't use the graphic card at all. OpenGL and DirectX need consistent data (triangle and texture), something that 3D applications cannot always provide. In wireframe mode, for example, the graphic card's GPU is - most of the time - bypassed.

VUE 4 doesn't use RTTM (real time texture mapping) so the only job left to the graphic card is to draw the triangles of single colored 3D meshes. Even a cheap GeForce 4 MX440 can do this task.

For the price of the latest ATI or Nvidia GPU, you can buy a second 2 GHz Intel or Athlon processor. If you're using your system for 3D, the choice is very simple : get a second processor. Rendering speed and display speed will be improved radically.

Eric