That's where I went to reinstall AIR.

I'm going to try removing both Poser and AIR at the same time, and then reinstall them.

That's what clicking on the LSMGUIAIR.EXE is supposed to do.  Instead, it returned the error message I attached in my original post.

Is there a separate AIR.EXE outside of Poser that I can click on to force an update?

Quote - Cycles DOES have SSS. Just not on the GPU at the moment.

Ah.  Thank you.

Quote - Nvidia cards support OpenCL GPU processing as well, they just aren't as efficient at processing OpenCL instructions as ATI cards. Cycles, LuxRender SLG (GPU only) and CPU+GPU all use OpenCL, and run on Nvidia cards.

Thank you for clarifying.

I passed on a 3GB 780 in favor of my 4G 760 when I was built my render rig last October, because I didn't want to spend more on the 780.  Eight months later, I can afford to get an even better version of the 780 than what was available at the time.

Even though Cycles doesn't currently offer SSS, I can still enjoy the extra rendering power while learning how to use Blender.  And once Paolo greenlights GPU rendering with Reality, I can take advantage of nVidia's support for OpenCL.

Amazon dropped the price on the 6GB 780 another $10 to $570 for Prime members - $30 off from its $600 MSRP.  I'm not passing that up, so I've re-ordered one.  It'll be here Monday.

Quote - Octane uses OpenGL, and runs best on nVidia cards, but Lux uses OpenCL and prefers AMD cards.

Mother pus bucket.  So much for that idea.

I'm not switching to ATI or AMD.  I've never used anything but nVidia.

Thanks for the tip.  Much appreciated.  I'm not in the habit of needlessly wasting money, so I've canceled my order.

Quote - Cycles is a great rendering engine, but at least in 2.70 the gpu renderer won't do SSS, so images with a decent skin shader need to be rendered on the cpu at the moment.

Another great tip, thanks.  I love SSS to much to give that up.

I'll just remain content with CPU-based rendering.  It's much less of a headache to understand, and less expensive.  At least I've got a powerhouse of a CPU.

Quote - **
@Nyghtfall**
So now that you're happy with the preview speed, working in Poser and rendering in Lux via Reality, have you thought about what might be out there to feed your hunger for shrubbery/forestry etc?

I'm not aware of anything comparable to Vue, and haven't bothered looking.  As I mentioned earlier, I'm sticking with prefabbed Poser content for woodsy outdoor scenes, like the Enchanted Forest at DAZ 3D.

But, thanks to your persistant advice, and heddeld's mention of a term I'm unfamiliar with called "cycles" - I decided to check out Blender for other possible uses completely unrelated to this thread.

So.  Cycles is Blender's open-source answer to a $500 copy of Octane.  Interesting.  A 6GB video card would definitely be useful for that.  There's a setting in Reality to enable GPU rendering for Lux, but Paolo recommends against using it for now.

Given the rising popularity of GPU-based rendering, I've decided to future-proof my PC and buy the card.  If at some point Reality/Lux begin offering GPU rendering as well, I want to be ready for it.  Meanwhile, I'm going to start learning how to use Blender, too.  I want to expand my skills beyond creating art with Poser, and Blender looks like a promsing challenge.

My new video card will be here Saturday.

Quote - Do you have Enable Harware Shading on in the preview settings? If yes, switch it off for this scene and see if things speed up.

I did have it enabled.  Disabling it helped.

Quote - I'm sure you've tried switching between the PBuffer and Scene Window, if not give that a try.

Already using Scene Window.

Quote - There also is the Preview texture resolution slider. With this being one huge prop, I would set it lower then usual, that could speed up things a lot.

And now we're cookin'.  Disabling hardware shading and sliding the texture resolution all the way to the left did the trick.

Thanks!  :D

Quote - ... of course the preview window won't look quite as good as before after disabeling the hardware shading, but the speed boost is quite noticeable.

I don't render in Poser anyway, so that's not a concern.  My workflow uses Reality/Lux.

PP14 SR 3.1

Found a free GPU monitoring app, called GPUZ.

Even with just the loft apartment loaded, GPUZ reported only 243MB of VRAM in use, so, yeah, the graphics card would've been a huge waist.

According to what little info I could find on how to boost performance in Poser's Preview Window, the only solution availble to try is to make sure OpenGL is selected as the preview engine, instead of SreeD, and it already is.

This is really annoying.

Heavy sigh...

Even the price lists on the New Items pages are unevenly positioned from item to item.

Please go back to the drawing board and fix these issues, asap.

I just read the article about the revamp, and noticed they used the same poor button design on the My Cart and Wishlist pages, including light blue and light green buttons.

I would suggest either using darker background colors, or darker text.

I'm suddenly very glad I mentioned the new card here.  I'd love to have it, but if I'm just going to be wasting my money on a negligible performance improvement, I'd rather put my money toward other things, and re-visit the possibility of buying the card later, when the price drops.

I'll try examining VRAM usage when navigating that prop and see what I can do to tweak my settings.

Thanks for the tips.

I don't play games, either, nor do I have a GPU renderer.

My intent is to give Poser's Preview Window more VRAM to maintain smooth navigation when working with scenes with high poly counts.

For example, I recently bought this Loft Apartment.  The genius who created it made the whole thing and its contents one giant, non-adjustable Prop.  Navigation slows to a crawl when I venture inside, and is reduced to a virtual slide-show when I add V4 and M4 to the scene.  I'm hoping the extra VRAM will smooth things out again.

Quote -
Aren't you going to tell us what you found more worthy than Vue?
Curious what else is out there for all that shrubbery stuff!

Are you suggesting a new video card isn't worth $600?  :)

Headache tabs... nice... hehehe...

I've actually already found a much more worthy alternative to Vue.  I recently learned that EVGA has released a 6GB Geforce GTX 780 graphics card.  I'll be ordering that in the next few weeks to replace my 4GB Geforce GTX 760.