I've ordered Poser 5 and waiting for the damn thing to arrive, but anyhow... After reading some of the posts here, how useable is Poser 5 in relation to Poser 4 in terms of speed? It seems it's gonna take ages to add textures, add hair and everything else which would have taken minutes under Poser 4.... Just how slow is to set scenes under 5?

The UI seems to work about as fast as Pro Pack on my system. Unless you're working with dynamic hair and cloth, it shouldn't take you much longer to load items from the Libraries and set up scenes than it would in Poser 4. The Materials Room takes a little getting-used-to (far more options than the P4 materials panel), but it's well worth the extra effort.

Thanks Little Dragon... I just wanted to make sure I hadn't made a huge mistake buying 5.... there has been quite a lot of negative feedback up to now. I'll know in a few days hopefully... when it arrives.

For me the biggest difference is in the firefly renderer when you turn on shadows. Those shadow maps take a long time render...but with out that turned on it seems about the same even with the new hair.

It's even slower when you change the lights' properties to raytraced shadows, rather than shadow maps. I'm still getting used to FireFly rendering top-down.

And the little block rendering...I'm used to the little lines...I miss that little man too.

Interestingly enough, the little man is still in there. He's a bit different, though. Look in your Runtime/Scripts folder for status45.avi.

I just installed Poser 5 and I am amazed by how slow it is. I run 2.2 Gz with 512mb of memory. I am also having other problems. After I render a scene the screen won't go back to posing. I also run True Space 5 and Carrara Studio. Neither of these apps comes close to Poser 5 in the amount of memory used. So far, I have found Poser 5 to be unuseable for all practical purposes.

No pain no gain. If you use the P4 dork with dork hair, and P4 render, in P5, its just as fast as doing the same thing in P4. If you want to use all the extra bells and whistles, they are bound to come with a price. I remember someone saying "640k ought to be enough for anyone". I also recall that same person saying "storage is cheap". If we are going to have a new app on the market, then we have to expect that it will need a more robuste machine. Heck, I guess we could all go back to DOS 5. You have any idea how screaming fast that would run on a 2.2 machine? I bet you're glad you don't have to program your image files in basic though. Lots of the new apps are forward looking to technology. This is a change from the old way of doing things. In the past, folks made apps that ran fast on the existing technology. But in that old thinking, people complained that the upgrades were merely nominal changes. Now comes apps like Pandromeda, P5 and rumors of a new Bryce 6 that all are betting on a technological explosion to run. If you wanna be seen in a Porsche, you better get ready to pay the shop a time or two. If not, go get an old station wagon. Sorry, I hear your frustration. I'm not all that excited about upgrading either, but its the way of the dinosaur. Bigger and smarter eats the predicessors.