I've just bought a new G4 400 (sawtooth)mac, it's running with 256 meg ram. Does anyone know why it renders animations a lot slower than my old Pentium II 350 (128mb ram 8mb graphics on mo/board)

How much RAM of your 256 have you assigned to Poser?

Gee, I hate to do this, but top 10 reasons are: 10 All the super speed claims for G4 are only in PhotoShop 9 Apple sold you an old Mac in a new case 8 Apple needs the money so they left something out 7 It is really rendering faster, only in "Apple time" 6 It is really rendering so fast you didn't notice it finish. 5. It is really just saving up time so you will have an extra day at the end of the year. 4. Bill Gates has paid off all the people who build watches. 3. Steve Jobs needs the extra time for his "Next" operating system. 2. The Mac OS is so good it just needs extra time for superior results (or similar doublespeak) 1. Macs are normally only superior in speed "claims" Sorry, Sorry, but I couldn't help myself! - and I'm called "Mr. Mac" where I work (but mostly I fix 'em!)

Thank you "Mr.Mac"(I have a similar nickname, MacMan!) But you finally proved that "PCs Rule, Macs Drool!" But I digress, Macs are okay machines, but I have seen and heard enough people complain about thier macs as I have seen and heard people p&moan about the PCs. But Mr.Mac has a point. The speed they claim is in Photoshop, Quark, and Claris products like Filemaker, but DUH! They are programs that were originally made for Mac, not PC, so it makes sense they would work faster on the MACOS. But when it comes to just pure speed, PCs can beat a Mac, and for less money. Consider this, You can get a P3 650, 128-256MB ram, 17-20 gig hard drive, 56K Modem and NIC, DVD, CD-RW, plus a decent software bundle for under $2K. Less than the cost of a similarly equipped Mac. How much did you pay for your G4? 2K, 2500? Macs are nice, but the Bang for the Buck is much better for PCs, although PCs generally have low resale values, even after only a year or two, while Macs are worth slightly more. If you want a computer with Power to spare, get a PC, if you want a computer that you can resell for a nice price, and have a Candy colored box, get a Mac. Not trying to intice a Mac/PC war, just laying out facts. I mean, I own an older Mac, it's a Performa 6300. Only complaint is the modem is a 28.8, and I can't get the printer to work properly, and the display can only reach 256 colors. I even upgraded the OS from System 7.6.2, to Mac OS 8. And I put Softwindows 2.0 on it. But my trusty CTX 266Mhz AMD-K6, with 64MB RAM, and a 4.3 gig hard drive, renders fairly speedy, for a 400x400 pic I can do it in a couple of minutes, depending on the poly count of the object I am rendering. But comparing Macs and PCs is like comparing a Saturn to a Dodge. Both have thier good points and their bad points.

I would go with the memory idea myself first. A lot of the ultra high perfomance claims depend on the program incorperating some sort of oddball instructions. Like MMX for a PC. But it should not be much slower, I would think. Try booting it with minimum extensions and such also.

Another suggestion - you wrote that it happens with animations. Have you checked the QuickTime compression settings? QuickTime4 offers a couple of very high quality compression methods for video output, but they take a lot of time. If your G4 currently uses a high quality one, but your PII a much rougher mode, that might explain it.

Thanks for all your replies - Poser on the G4 has 200meg assigned to it - as for the compression - I've tried rendering with different compression settings but there's not much difference. Incidently, the scene I"m trying to render consists of a single poser figure - I'm rendering at 768 x 576 @ 25fps (PAL format) - the PII is rendering at one frame every 20-25 secs and the G4 is rendering at one frame every 45secs - 1minute!

ewan- It shouldn't be that much slower, I assume you also have virtual memory turned on? If you do have it on, try turning it off, I've installed scanners on Macs that would scan 4 time faster with virtual memeory turned off. Other than that I'm at a loss. Incidently, years ago we did a school progect on our (even then) antique SG workstations, in Alias, rendertime was 1 frame per day at one stage!

thanks Jim - I've tried with vm on and off - not much difference. I've read from other news groups that all metcreations programs run very slowly on G4's (Bryce, Canoma et. al) especially when rendering. I've contacted metacreations with this problem - so I'll post a message here when (or if!) I get a reply - once again thanks for all your replies.

The programers need to write code to take advantage of the Altivec engine in the G4 for max speed. It makes sense that Adobe would take the time to do this as most professional graphics houses are heavy into MAC stuff (& they charge a good price for their apps). MC products are priced for & written for the home market where cheaper prices & Windose dominates. Why bother to make a good product better on one OS?

Also, you may want to check the "Energy Saver" control panel on the G4. If it's "on" it may slow down when there is no mouse or keyboard input. Turn it off and see if that helps.

First, apologies for my bad english.... i agree Willf about the altivec. And it seems that poser don't like networking very much. I use a cable modem and i have to disabled tcp/ip to get the full speed, ot it will crash. Remember also that poser seems to be developped under windows, and ported to MacOS, so some of the code are not very well implemented. And if the New G4 is really powerful, some apps don't work well with it... In some cases, a G4/400 is slower than a G3/400. About he video card, the ATI shipped in the G4 is not as good as it seems. Another Video Card can have better performances...

Backwards. It is built with Code Warrior on a mac and ported.

ooops. sorry, you are right. Bryce is developped under windows... if the beta versions i've tried don't lie.. :

Actually Bryce was a Mac only program until MC got their hands on it. A few months ago when the whole MC fiasco began we were getting statements from the creator/owner of Bryce about possible plans to take it back to being Mac only. Don't know how that all ended out but I suspect that it's a good indication that Bryce is developed on the Mac. My main issue with Macs is stability. My work Mac crashes 5-10 times/day (I'm clocking about 8 or so so far today. I don't count anymore though, these days it's just become a normal part of my workday to assume regular crashes. Save and Save VERY often...). My PC crashes a few times per week. Both are used heavily for graphics work, browsing, and programming.

Get an ALPHA and run windows NT Poser and most metacreations programs can run on NT. If you want ot get a faster Machine that is.

Then you just need to get Metacreations to sell you a copy of Poser for Alpha NT... Certainly Alpha NT used to run x86 programs, but only by using software emulation of x86 instructions; there's no point buying a faster processor and then using it to run a slow emulation of an x86 chip! Incidentally, it would seem odd for Bryce to go back to being just a Mac program, as I presume that they have a huge PC user base now. Certainly my copy of Bryce 2 is running on a PC, not a Mac, and I've been thinking about buying a much more up-to-date version.