Yes, its true...I went back to P4 tonight to work on some mimic stuff...hate to say this, but of course I will....P4 is just so much more of a pleasure to use...it works, it isn't as sluggish, and it works....plus its much, much faster...loading, moving, changing, manipulating, rendering, the whole shebang. Its not like I have a really slow system either....P5 is just much slower in all aspects. AMD XP1800+ 1.53mhz 512meg PC2100 ram GF3 Ti500 64m video

Well, thanks to Little Dragon, I have mimic working just fine with Judy now. Got her blinking. I don't see hardly any change using the P4 woman in P4 and using the P4 woman in P5. Where P5 slows down is with the new models, and that's to be expected. No pain, no gain.

I think that's to be expected, after all, if you load posette in P4, with her default texture, and some hair from the default library and render or move it around, you'll get alot faster results and render than you will by loading vicky into P4, with one of those ultra high-res texture and bump maps, trans-mapped hair, and a dozen lights all with shadows turned on. It would be nice to have all the new features, with all the old speed, but it rarely works out that way. But I do know what you mean about the speed,P5 is kind of like running P4 on my old laptop :)

could be...I'm finding it just slow in everything...loading figures, changing rooms...maybe something is wrong with my system...but I'm also one of the lucky ones having the screen problems...its probably all related. I've been whining a bit about P5...but I honestly can't really use it...its just too painful...and I'm not gaining much except frustration.

I use only Vic, Mike , and Steph in P4.... and so far just the new P5 characters in P5.... I don't know......

Dave-So, You're not alone in suffering weird video stuff and crashes in P5. I commiserate...boy do I commiserate. --lb

its a real bummer....for lack of a better word :) I really want to like this program, but its not possible right now....

Be interesting to see a comparison of performance vs memory. %12MB certainly seems like a fair amount, but I wonder if P5 may require even more to move along at a decent pace.

I know you saw my other post (aka RANT)Dave-So, about my total frustration with P5. I get a warm fuzzy feeling whenever I go back and use P4. It doesn't help that Curious Labs didn't "get with the 90's" and include 3D acceleration in the form of Hardware OpenGL support. Or in ANY form for that matter.

Those who don't have the Pro pack will notice the biggest difference.

The binary RSR was dumped and the program now reads the plain text .OBJ file instead which is slower.

This is something that Poser users have asked for in the past. RSR's were a cross platform pain, but they were quicker to process.

Yep when I compare the ProPack to P4 the ProPack has always been slower for me. The other thing Dave as far as it being slower on the p5 figures may have something to do with the fact that the cr2 is compressed into a crz. Look in the folder. They have compression in the ProPack. I found things seemed to be slower loading when I have files compressed. Ron

Hi, (lugging the laptop onto the lap for this one :) I've never had Pro-Pack, never saw the need, but one of the things I like about Poser is that fact that it renders fast. OK, so it fakes reflections, etc. but it makes the babes look good, so what do I care :) But reading in another thread about CPU usage brought back memories of renering on my laptop, it's a PIII 700Mhz and a few minutes after bringing up Poser the fan would come on and stay on. I used to grab a few magazines as insulation, as my lap would get uncomfortably hot. I used to pose using "bounding box" because otherwise Poser became a slide show, you could see it visibly doing screen refresh, as it srained to keep up. I gave up using "fully textured" both because of frustration, and the fact that you always overshot. Poser would still be moving the figure .5 - 1 seconds after you stopped moving the mouse. Then I bought the Hires maps and Up-Do from DAZ, and that just killed my computer,I could render if one, but if I tried both, I was guaranteed a crash... So I maxed out my RAM, (512Mb) threw loads of figures including the Hires Maps and the Up-Do into a scene and hit "render" it worked! Still using bounding box, but I'm used to that by now. Then upon news that P5 is imminent, I splurge on a new box, Pentium 4, 2Ghz, but only 256Mb RAM, I install Poser and it's not until I'm mucking about with it later that I notice something. It's moving fast and it's fully textured. I tweak the face to make her smile and she does it in realtime, it's quite a magical realisation. Since then I've rendered multiple characters, using big maps, (all by Steffy Z) with bumps, "global" lighting and transmapped hair, with sundry other bits like animals and props, and it just keeps on ticking. Now obviously I have added processor grunt to thank for this, it's not simply a tripling of processor speed, but a quantative advance of the whole pipeline. I have a nice GFX card, I'm running at 1600x1200, but I know that any card capable of 1024x768@24bit will do just as well. As Poser makes no use of the graphics card except through the OS as a display device. That is after-all what the whole DirectX thing is about, making it so that programmers no longer have to hit the metal, because DirectX does it for them. All they code to is an API, it's hardware agnostic. So, if you're telling me, that with P5 I should expect to return to the days of sloth on my laptop. That even if I can find somebody to sell me 2 512Mb DDR DIMS, to max out my memory to 1Gb, (been to two local computer shops, two department store computer departments, and two wharehouse size technology stores all without luck..) that my brand new 2Ghz machine is going to revert to a PIII 700 in all but name then that's fairly dissapointing... Is the slowdown just with firefly, or does the P5-P4 renderer suffer as well? Does anyone out there have a 2Ghz Pentuim and 256Mb RAM? How do Vicky, Mike and the kids perform? What's the status of the registration process if you leave it to timeout after 30 days, do you have to re-install? Or can you get in to get a new challenge code? If it wasn't for the fact that I preordered on faith, I'd be having second thoughts by now... later jb

My recollection is that P1 didn't have texturing, but I may be wrong. Seriously though, I still use Paint Shop Pro v4 for minor graphic edits, file conversion, resizing etc. It gets the job done and is much quicker to load than Photoshop v6. Also, however feature-rich a program may be, if using it is like wading through molasses, it's not much fun to use.

(WinXP, Athlon 1.4GHz, 512MB RAM) I just tried a comparison between Pro Pack and Poser 5, in loading DAZ's Vicki with a texture map. Tried a few other loading tests also. Consistently about 10% slower in Poser 5 using identical (uncompressed) files. For quick test renders, in Render Options, switch to "Poser 4 Renderer", and turn OFF "Cast Shadows" (obviously, "Anti-alias" should be off as well).

The bad news: It doesn't render, clothes don't conform, it's as slow as a snail on Quaaludes, the new figures look like throw-backs to P3, and the interface has egg all over it.

The good news: It never crashes my Mac. It doesn't exist. What a relief...