Hi all -- This Q is for any of you out there who've gotten their copy of Poser 5 or the Poser 5 Upgrade. When I start and use Poser 5 it seems sort've slow. Especially if I try to render figures w/ props, the dynamic hair, etc. I have a Pentium IIII 1.5 Mhz... And 1.5 megs of RAM. This is above what is recommended for the software. So I can't understand why it's being so slow. Any suggestions or help would be appreciated! Thanks :)

1.5 megs of RAM ????????????????????????? That's not even enough to load all of Windoze, n'est pas? That could be your problem. ;=] Check your RAM.

He probably means 1.5 gig of RAM (which is a lot). We all get this stuff confused from time to time. --jjsemp

Yes sorry I do mean 1.5 gigs of RAM. Thanks JJ for understanding me LOL :)

I think the 1.5 Mhz might be your problem. That's Commodore-64 speed. ;-) But seriously, the new features (like dynamic hair, cloth, etc.) add a LOT of overhead. Also, it depends on which rendered you are using. The new Firefly renderer is noticeably slower. -Tim (P4 1.8 GHZ, GIG O' RAM, DUAL 100GB HD'S, GeForce3 64MB card -- which Poser makes ABSOLUTELY NO REAL use of)

Thanks Tim. I am told though that Poser 5 SHOULD be able to handle this. It's more than recommended. I guess it should read 1.5 Gig on both RAM and Mhz. I'm tired LOL -- so I forgot to specify that and thought I was specifying it correctly.

... but I HAD to ask. ;=] You have plenty of RAM and a high speed uP, but sometimes other program running in the background can really slow things up. If you are running Win XP, you can use "Task Manager" to see what other programs are running and where your processor is spending it's time. "Alt-Cntl-Del" will bring up the Task Manager ... - or - You can "right-click" on the tool bar at the bottom of the screen to [menu] select the Task Manager. cheers, dr geep ;=]

The new hair adds a ton of polys to the render. Each strand is set at 20 polygons as the default. With just one 'clump' of 1000 strands, you've included 20,000 polygons to the render. Add any refection and the overhead goes up drastically. One curious thing I noted was that, with FireFly, small test renders can actually take much longer then full size renders. I think it has to do with the bucket size setting but am still investigating that one.

Thanks, Dr. Geep for the suggestions :)

Hi Bushi :) Thanks for replying! Yeah, I figured when I loaded the hair that it must have tons of polys. : Please keep us posted on what you find out. Yeah, I sure am glad they left the Poser 4 renderer on there in case you don't want to use Firefly. :)

Wow ... that's DEPRESSING!!

Nerd... you wouldn't happen to have a Bryce around over there to render it in - I'm interested to see how it stacks up for speed vs a noted slow poke renderer.

Nope, had Bryce 4. Never could wrap my brain around it's materials, Gave it away. wgreenlee1, Yup, we've been waiting years and it seem we are still waiting in some respects. The Dynamic Hair is really cool, wish the render was written by the same guy ;-) Fortunately the "P4" Render can handle most of the material tricks P5 does and it is just as fast as P4.

wgreenlee1 if you can't be constructive then just shut up! I'm really getting sick of seeing your name pop up all over the place with your stupid little childish & petty uninformed comments, please stay in the LW forum where your idiocy has plenty of company.

Hey c1rcle, Step away from the coffee sir. Just put it down and walk away.

yeah I know sorry everyone, had a headache earlier, let it get to me, I'm ok now honest :)

RnRWoman: 1.5 GIG of RAM should be the Problem ... I have had the same problems that apps getting slow with that High RAM. I have reduced it to 1 GIG and all works fine again. On which OS you are? Win2K or WinXP or 98 ? for Win2K and WinXP I can say that it is only able to adress 1 GIG of RAM ... maybe thats the problem. I havn't got an answer from M$ for it but I think they are busy ... my mail is only 7 months old :) Chris

Hi Chris :) Thanks for replying! Actually I am running WinXP ... XP acknowledges that I have 1.5 Gig's of RAM. So I'm not sure if that's it or what. I don't have any problems w/ programs being slow except Poser 5. While shutting down other programs to run Poser 5 helps some, it still is a little slow. I'm not sure if getting more RAM will help remedy that. Maybe we should call Curious Labs? I dunno. Anyway, thanks for your opinion :)