In this instance, the problem wasn't lack of competency, but lack of staff

While that's a nice sounding excuse, low staff doesn't absolve them of responsibility for a quality product. One could argue endlessly whether it was worthwhile to ship an inferior port rather than not shipping a port at all, but that's not the point. For what it's worth I gladly bought Poser 5 as soon as it became available, and as someone who does this stuff entirely as a hobby with no time pressures at all, I find the preview and editing performance perfectly acceptable. If the renderer is perhaps slower than some others, it's actually not a big deal for me. (Not that faster isn't always better.)
None of that means they shouldn't (or couldn't) have done it right.

HaHa! I must chuckle at you Mac users.

This is the kind of off-topic rant that starts pointless and unproductive flame wars. This has nothing to do with Mac vs PC; at issue is solely CL's demonstrated lack of skill in cross platform development. If you have nothing to contribute, you could at least display the decency to stay quiet.

512Mb is tiny. Sorry, but it's true. Yeah, you'll stall a lot on memory access. P4 ran OK in Classic, but I find P5 far better -- as well as a lot more stable. I suppose it depends a lot on what you're doing, but P5 is not intrinsically and unavoidably slower. Very likely much more of a memory hog, though!

It runs smoothly and quickly for me on my dual 1Ghz G4; unless I've got a large and complicated scene. A big scene can easily take a couple gigabytes of virtual memory. If you don't have enough physical memory, Poser can spend all its time reading and writing your RAM pages to disk. That's virtual memory.

Even in high-resolution Firefly rendering, Poser doesn't take an entire processor; it's too busy waiting to read and write virtual memory pages in the swap file. In general, adding RAM is more likely to help Poser than faster processors. (At least, until you've added enough RAM to keep it happy, adding processor power won't help much.)

Memory is critical. Poser eats a lot; a moderately complicated scene can easily take well over 1Gb to render. Whether Windows or Mac, the system is using a fair amount of memory already, and even if you have 1.5Gb Poser is going to be paging a lot. That slows things down immensely. Better paging helps; and that means Mac OS X is better than Mac OS 9, Win XP is better than Win 98; etc.

Right now, for example, I happen to have a render running behind this browser. Mac OS X 10.3.4, dual 1Ghz G4 with 1.5Gb. Poser is taking only about 89% CPU (and despite not being explicitly multiprocessor-aware, that's NOT all one CPU, because some of the OS subsystems Poser uses are threaded), and there's idle CPU time on both processors. In other words, a faster processor wouldn't make much difference. But Poser's total virtual memory is 2.55Gb; of which only 940Mb is in physical memory; there are virtually no free pages. (That's with 4 Vickis and a global lighting setup with lots of lights.) The system is averaging a couple of hundred pagefaults (meaning something needs memory that's currently in a paging file on disk) every second; and probably most of that is Poser. It adds up.

Any graphics application is going to eat memory; but some, like Photoshop and various high-end 3D apps devote substantial engineering time to optimizing their memory management; knowing that it can make a big difference in performance.

If you want Poser to run faster, more memory is probably going to help a lot more than a faster CPU. In this particular case, if I had 2.5Gb free physical memory, I suspect Poser would be waddling along sprightly enough. (And once you get rid of the paging, THEN you may well find that a faster CPU will help even more... but I'm holding out for the 2nd generation G5s ;-) )

RTEJava was written this year by Mark Davis. I suspect it's in Freestuff; but you can also get it at http://www.geocities.com/RTEJava/alpha/

It works well, with the advantage that you should be able to run it anywhere with a Java implementation.

Does Mac converter handle pcf? I thought pcf files were pretty much off limits for Mac users.

It works with most, anyway, though I've heard suggestions it doesn't work with all. What it doesn't do is RTE. But RTEJava takes care of that. Of course it'd be nice to have them combined; along with something that can fix those old rsr files without running Classic. With Poser 5, those 3 functions are all that's needed.

At least it supports dynamic clothes, apparently... but not dynamic hair, which is a shame. Still, having Carrara 3 and P5 already, it seems almost silly not to get this. Certainly the most frustrating thing about P5 is the slowness (and instability) of the renderer...

wait....the Cloth Simulator is optional for MAC users?

Only in the sense that you don't have to upgrade to Poser 5. The cloth room is a basic part of Poser 5 on both platforms.

Fewer bugs in Poser 5 on Mac on initial release, mostly because it was done later and includes the first 3 rounds of patches from Windows. There are still some annoying bugs; I've had some crashes, and it's pretty slow in places, and a few scenes seem to cause the Firefly renderer to just give up and render black for half the image.

But the hair and cloth rooms are awesome. Not that cloth couldn't be improved a lot. It ought to be able to resolve initial position collisions on its own, for example; which would be really nice when moving clothes from one character to another.

But with a long flowing dress, dynamic hair, and a wind generator... it definitely makes the upgrade more than worth the cost and occasional hassles.

If you run the DAZ installer, it locates the Poser(TM) 4 folder; but the popup allows you to select another directory. You can select the Poser 5 folder (um, right now I can't remember if you select the Poser 5 folder or the Runtime folder inside it, but the experiment is easy), and it'll install there.

You can also use your Poser 4 runtime from Poser 5, if you want. (I chose not to, just because I had so much miscellaneous junk there.) I copied a bunch of "obvious" stuff from the Poser 4 runtime; though it's sometimes tricky because you have to find the geometry, pose files, and textures. (If you don't want to use the whole runtime, it's probably easiest to find the original zip or installer file.)

In order to use your tools, will I have to reboot in OS9 or something?

I've been using Martin's tools in Classic since I first started running Mac OS X. (Along with Poser 4, which worked fine despite technically not being "supported" by CL.) If you're sticking with Poser 4 you'll need to keep your Mac OS 9 System Folder anyway to start Classic. With Poser 5, MacConverter isn't needed as much. However, you still need to convert rsr and pef files. (Though pef files are relatively uncommon, and rsr files are slowing being replaced or at least supplemented by PP/5 png previews.)

I think they have done something with their VISE installers, so now they only work in OS 9.2.2 and nothing earlier.

Interesting. Since I no longer use 9.2.2 or anything earlier, I wouldn't have noticed. What I have noticed recently is that recent DAZ installers are Carbon instead of Classic, and can run with just Mac OS X. Your older 9.x probably lacks the latest Carbon extension. > Daz could save alot of $$ and man-hours if they did it like everybody else and used zip files which expand to Runtimes in the place of our choice. Their use of installers makes them look like they're stuck in the 80s.

The installers are a nice convenience; we don't need to use MacConverter on DAZ files. Which is nice, if not essential. Now, with Poser 5, it no longer matters -- they could ship the raw crossplatform Poser 5 files and png previews, and both Mac and PC people would be happy. Unfortunately, when Fractal faced the design decisions associated with a cross-platform product, they decided against cross-platform data formats, and relied on the Mac's resource fork architecture. Which has a lot of nice advantages, as long as you're not transferring files; but meant that the PC files needed to be different. CL has finally fixed this problem for Poser 5, and that's great -- any PC packages that don't need pefs and that are at least ProPack aware (png instead of rsr) work just fine on both without any conversion.

Almost every application runs faster on OS 9 than on OS X.

As duanemoody commented, most Classic applications will run faster in Mac OS 9 than Mac OS X -- they are, after all, Mac OS 9 apps and the emulation imposes some overhead as well as a different operating environment. The ones that behave most poorly (like Poser!) tend to be those that were coded to be CPU hogs, depending on being able to run as long as they want without interference. Which is something I always hated when running OS 9 anyway, and I consider that at best inconsiderate programming. Otherwise, most apps run as fast or faster under OS X, especially in 10.2 and later...

... but the resource demands are higher, and if you're short on memory or pushing a really old CPU too hard, you're likely to notice it more on OS X. Still, people with even relatively slow G4s (and even G3s!) get quite acceptable performance. And the benefits of OS X stability and flexibility are substantial. And of course on my dual processor system there's no comparison: with OS 9 half of my computer would be dead!

I think most people on the Mac aren't on 5 yet since it was so buggy for the PC

Or simply because they're holding out to see whether DAZ Studio lives up to expections, eh? But unless you're sticking with Mac OS 9 for some reason, the mere fact that P5 runs native instead of under Classic represents an enormous improvement over P4.

With the advent of Poser 5 on Mac OS X, long file names (and path names) should work just fine. (And if they don't it's an application problem not an OS limitation.) Actually, I experimented just now by copying and renaming a file in my character library. It did work, although Poser seems to have gotten itself in a bit of a twist about it; when I selected the file it popped a dialog asking me to locate file ".cr2". When I selected the file in the dialog, though, it opened just fine. (The name display in the library was so small that it was completely illegible, so Poser would need some GUI work if they want long names to be practical.) Poser 4, however, will continue to be limited by the OS 9 filename limits. Also, Poser 5 shouldn't require MacConverter for most file other than to decode pcf geometry. (Though I haven't gotten a chance to experiment with unzipping raw PC files into my Poser 5 tree yet.)