Does anyone has the same problems.

When P5 is dealing with some architecture and other stuff. The response time when only moving the mouse over an object, is testing my nerves...

TIA

Ronald

Message edited on: 06/07/2004 16:26

Yup, Poser 5 Mac is really slow for me too - DP G4 1.4 gig.

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.)

Yeah I run P4 Pro and P5 on my Dual G4 768MB. I cannot use P5 as after nearly EVERY operation I get beachballs for about 10 sec. SO ANNOYING. What does Curious recommend? 512 yeah? Yeesh did they even test it on a Mac? I use Pro in Classic, its no where near ideal, but its better than P5. Funny thing tho, I can run a Windows version of P5 in VPC and I kid you not its performance is comprable (if not better, no beachballs) to P5 running native in Panther. Go figure. Shame because I really enjoy using Poser, if P5 could run ok I could finally trash Classic from my HD, oh and if softrabbit made OSX versions of his software.

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!

I've got a dual G5 with 1.5 GB memory, and I haven't had any problems with P5 being slow... the only time I notice problems is if I've loaded TONS of textures in one file that aren't being used, but closing P5 and reopening it fixes that. Have you installed SR4? And I assume you're running OSX 10.3.4?

Keep in mind that Poser 5 CANNOT take advantage of dual processors... so you'd be getting the same optimal speeds on a single processor machine. But you still shouldn't be experiencing huge delays, I use P5 exclusively and would never go back to dumpy old P4 in classic.

~ Molly

Well i have 1,5 Gb. I also have an PC with 1,5 Gb memory, AMD 64. Thats running XP Both machines are upgraded to the latest available Poser 5 version and OS. When i open the same poser5 composition. I dont have the irritating wait times when you only move your mouse over the objects. When i check with the top command in OSX is see that poser is consuming all of the CPU power, so that's causing the wait. So maybe its a serious BUG inside the OSX version. Ok when i only load an figure and some clothes no problem, but with some real nice building.. its takes forever.. Is there no other way to troubleshoots this behavious, because its (in my opinion) totally unexectable, and you really can not work this way on an mac. Tried also to do the same thing in Daz Studio, and that progam does it with NO real CPU time taken. So i guess its an real Poser5 OSX issue...

I got the Dual G5 with 2 Gig ram and P5 hums along nicely. Also, I'm running Panther. Not sure if that makes a difference.

http://schuetzenpowder.com/sigs.jpg

Well i have also no problems if i just stick with a "simple" pose. If i made an e.g. victoria 3 and some nice roman buildings with plants oeps... its stops humming and you can see poser has difficulties to keep the speed going.I also running panther.. and patched up2date.

If you've seen the Firefly benchmark render tests, the Mac, cycle for cycle, is about 20% slower then the PC (although I havn't been to the site for a while). I have 2 Macs here at work, one a G4 , 1.4GHz, 2 gig RAM, OS 10.3, and P5 SR4. The other a G4, 733MHz, 1gig RAM, OS9.2 and Poser 4.2 ProPack. Just as a quickie test I timed the following actions (p4/p5 in seconds): Load Poser to empty scene - 6.04 / 15.11 Load Blank M3 - 25.34 / 8.20 Load M3 Med. Textures - 7.22 / 7.85 Load M3 All Expressions !INJ - 13.92 / 25.36 Load M3 Ascending pose - 3.26 / 4.02 Big speed improvement in P5 Figure loading but P4 seems to be faster in everything else. I probably notice speed issues more cuase I still use PPP OS9. Best; Dan

Could you be so kind to test it with an extreme architecture thingy... I am losing my mind and only see the colors of the beach ball... ;-( this is no fun...

Extreme architecture and V3 and plants? And probably some textures? Hair? Maybe a few transparencies and reflections? The pose may be simple, but the rest of the load on your poor beastie isn't.

Yep so i would guess that Poser on the OSX is taken far more time than doing it on my Windows XP machine. What am i trying to tell.. I use poser 5 latest patches.. With the same poser 5 file with some architecture etc. When i compare the "i put my mouse over the building" on two different machines The machines are totally pathed till the end. And are Mac OSX 10.3.x with dual 2 GHz and 1,5 Gb memory Windows XP SP1 with AMD 64 3200+ with 1,5 Gb memory. The mac sure lack with response when i only move the mouse over the building, while the XP machine has no problem at all. My guess... Poser 5 OSX must go back to the test lab because this is totally unexceptable.. in my opinion. I am almost sure of the fact that the OSX port of the Poser Programm is badly done. I think when DAZ comes with his programm then the poser days are counting down. I tried also the same thing in DAZ studio on the mac.. lack to its beta state it does the same thing in speed mode and i dont see any beach balls..

HaHa! I must chuckle at you Mac users. I've been doing this nonsense for years and I truly do not understand why you always seem to fall for every little scam Mac throws at you. I do freelance effects and graphics in NYC and I've worked at Final Cut Pro editing houses and still I've never seen anyone use a Mac for any type of pro graphics. The mere fact the 3D Studio Max is unavailable for Mac should tell you something. There is no such thing as a fast Mac. I've got a Boxx w/ dual p4's and 12 gigs of RAM. Cost me almost half of what a similarly stocked G5 costs and I can put 9 different video cards in if I choose (one for each function just like an SGI). HaHa!

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.

Well said db!

Bryce, Poser, and several other graphics programs started as MAC ONLY. There are many video editing and screen-writing programs which started the same way. My 5th computer was a Mac, and I wished that I had switched years earlier. I have also used graphics programs on the C64 and various later Amigas, so have cross-platform experience... and will say this, each platform does certain things well. When porting an application, the developers have to balance having it work the same way vs getting the most from that platform. In this instance, the problem wasn't lack of competency, but lack of staff: the entire company was down to a literal handful of people. There is this to remember about pendulums: they swing both ways. Carolly

Okay is there anything i could do to undo these missteps in Poser 5 on the OSX platform.. If adding more RAM should do the trich i'll buy some more.... If i must resize some other things like the swap file (which i think is irrelevennt with this issue) i will do that.. I notice also when playing with light in only an V3 with some textures, and adding some poses i also see alotta beach balls... ;-( (and okay its off topic.. i think both platforms OSX and XP has its benefits, only in the short time i had my beautiful nice outfit in the form of an G5, i had to reinstall XP twice, to make it run smoothly)

well, I'm not particularly OSX savvy on the details, but I think the issue has nothing to do with your hardware. The one thing I'm not seeing in these threads is anything that would let me duplicate the issue to monitor the performance hits (albeit on PC) and spot the potential culprits. What is the set you are using? There are several architectural sets out there I wouldn't use becuase they are, bluntly, too damn large -- in polys, that is. There are some out there that look pretty nice but come in at a couple hundred thou polys each, and they each have gargantuan textures. The mem load on them alone -- jus the set and the textures for it -- is close to 2 GB. Add in a V3 plus a "hi-res" body texture and v3 hair with a hi res texture and you're talking a need for possible two gig more Ram. That'll cap out a windows system. Since I like to render anims with about four figs on average, I don't load these sets because they do me no good. I'd suggest looking to the architectual model you are using, the size of the textures for it, and the textures for the other elements -- reduce them and you'll likely see better performance.

thou and I, my friend, can, in the most flunkey world, make, each of us, one non-flunkey, one hero, if we like: that will be two heroes to begin with. (Carlyle)

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.

Well, since my earlier comment was 'off topic' I'll share some of the info given to me by a good freind and co-worker, who also happens to be the creative director for Smoke & Mirrors. Mac's operating system is the issue. It's written in a language that has to do something like three times as many translations as Windows, which is closer to machine language relatively speaking. This is the issue first and foremost. This is why there a very few professional level (ie. Houdini, 3DS Max, SoftImage, ART Renderdrives, etc.) graphics products available for Mac. Bryce is a toy. Poser is a nice toy. I have and continue to use them both. In fact I used poser in a spot I did for Kill Bill. But it takes ten steps to do something that takes two in any of the aforementioned packages. So that old 'They started off on Mac' arguement is silly. If you want speed, save up and get yourself ten of those little $400 Dell desktops and build a render farm. A single computer is foolish when it comes to 3D Graphics. Or get yourself a PC with a PURE graphics card, I guarantee it'll render a Poser scene in less time than it takes you to set up the preferences in the Firefly renderer.

Attached Link: http://www.apple.com/pro/film/murch/index3.html

"there a very few professional level graphics products" Maya, Lightwave and Electric Image aren't pro 3D apps? I kinda think of Maya, LW and Max as the big 3 in desktop 3D and two out of three ain't bad. What about Final Cut Pro? Cold Mountain was entirely edited with FCP (link). Most of Discreet's (MAX) newer products have been ported to OSX (like Combustion). Shoot, I know there's not as much available for the Mac and I know you didn't mean to imply that pro work can't be done on Macs. Actually all the video houses we work with have a mix of both Macs and PCs and most consider it a "best of both worlds" situation. We could trade "anything you can do I can do better" licks all day but that doesn't change the fact that Poser5 is slow under OSX. "$400 Dell desktops and build a render farm" Except Poser doesn't do distributed rendering. "Or get yourself a PC with a PURE graphics card," Again, won't help Poser - the real time display is taken from Bryce's Sree3D (no OGL) which no graphics card supports. As far as I know, the Firefly renderer is all CPU and doesn't use the features of high end video cards. Ever heard of ICOS? http://www.denounce.com/macgene.html :-) Sorry if this comes across as a rant and some of it's OT content; Dan who works with 3 PC's, 2 Macs and a big 'ol honking UNIX machine.

Lightwave was the first and it started out on Amiga. Maya wasn't available on Mac until like 2002 I beleive (after it dropped in price from $26,000). Most serious houses develop their own apps in house but Houdini is the top, 3D Studio Max is definitely #2 but the plug-ins run around $10,000. Then you can start talking about SoftImage, and maybe after that you can bring in the others though Cinema 4D is quickly blowing them out with its BodyPaint module. As far as Final Cut goes most of the movies cut with it were somehow linked to Outpost Digital (owned by John Cameron - Soderburg's Producer and owner of Radical Media which represents most of those Directors and which also cut a deal with Miramax before the advent of Final Cut. They have PC's in their GFX dept. by the way and are the FCP house in NYC.) Final Cut is OK but AVID owns ProTools and SoftImage so Final Cut has been left out of a very serious compatibility pipe there (you can open an AVID project in ProTools and only a maniac would use only audio recorded on location. Final Cut loves to boast all these features to those who don't know any better (why would you color correct in an AVID when you can color correct the negative on a DiVinci? Why would you online in an AVID when nearly every house in NYC has at least 1 Flame on the premises if not a Henry (Windows NT) or Inferno?) Final Cut is for cutting things like 'The Apprentice' primarily. And honestly, for that price range, nothing compares to Combustion. The Pure graphics card renders Alias/Wavefront files period (check out the benchmarks on Advanced Render Technologies website) and it can be configured for any software system, and there are numerous scripts available online that will make Poser render over a network (there used to be a few here.) and they work pretty good. Macs also have serious network issues, a network of G5's will usually only run at about 30-40% max. speed. Beleive me I have used Macs for pro work but they just can't hold up to the tanks that PC's have become. They're cute and sometimes they can do certain things as well as a PC but for the price it's a waste of money. We called them about Shake and noone in the entire company could offer a shred of info. I've got several systems in my office and my Mac needed about $20,000 worth of upgrades to bring it up to speed to even handle 2K After Effects files. (another issue with FCP, they act like HD is a big deal when its like 6 slots below the highest picture resolution.) My Boxx speeds through all of the above with absolutely no problems whatsoever, I can and just finished rendering 300 frames of Maya for a spot with HDRI, Radiosity, and Caustics in less than 10 hours. And believe me it was a seriously heavy shot to render.

Well, since my earlier comment was 'off topic' I'll share some of the info given to me by a good friend and co-worker, who also happens to be the creative director for Smoke & Mirrors. Mac's operating system is the issue. It's written in a language that has to do something like three times as many translations as Windows, which is closer to machine language relatively speaking. This is the issue first and foremost.

That's just ignorance. The ignorance may not be deliberately malicious, but that's still what it is. Both systems are written principally in C and C++, with some assembly language in the bottom machine-dependent layers. As are all modern operating systems. Your creative director may be trying to contrast C/C++ against Cocoa (Objective C), but without any real understanding of what they are. Objective C is really just C with some object-oriented extensions... the same as C++. Obj-C is more like Smalltalk than C++, with better support for runtime polymorphism; but the runtime costs are small even where the features are used, and nil otherwise.

And even so, this isn't the kernel, or even the low-level runtime libraries, (which are Open Source Darwin/BSD and GNU) but the complex of object frameworks that comprise the Mac's Cocoa GUI environment. Don't imagine for an instant that the Windows GUI class libraries are any simpler or "closer to the machine"; it ain't so. And while the Mac GUI is accelerated by 3D rendering hardware, that's an innovation that Microsoft hasn't yet copied. (Though they've already announced that they will for Longhorn, when and if it ever actually ships.)

In any case, though, Poser, Photoshop, very likely Maya and LightWave, are not Cocoa (Objective C) applications; they're "Carbon" applications. Carbon is a traditional C/C++ environment that's directly comparable to the GUI environment on Windows.

By the way, Mac OS X also supports "Cocoa" programming in Java; this is directly analogous to the use of C# in .Net, and C# after all is just Microsoft's clone of Java since they weren't allowed to corrupt Java to make it nonportable. [Note that this is not to say they don't have some smart people at Microsoft. C# does have some serious technical advantages over Java; but not enough to outweigh the risks of Microsoft's anti-standards philosophy.]

Hey, if you want to use Windows, go for it. Have a great time. The fact is that very few Windows people know much about the Mac (as your friend's comments attest); while most Mac people (and all of them in any professional environment) are extremely familiar with Windows and choose the Mac. We know there are more of you, and while that can be frustrating, in the end we really don't care because the advantages are overwhelming.

And if Microsoft's monopoly marketing machine manages in the end to get you all to kill off the Mac, you aren't likely to find most of us switching to Windows. That would be just silly.

Macs also have serious network issues, a network of G5's will usually only run at about 30-40% max. speed. Beleive me I have used Macs for pro work but they just can't hold up to the tanks that PC's have become.

Ah, more misinformation and ignorance. Yes, that'll help. PCs are "tanks"? Tanks full of what...?

Well i think thats it still is an programmers/porting issue. Why is it on a mac slow as ..ll with... same set loaded in poser etc... So if there are any Poser programmers are listening. Fix this issue? If i have to add more Gb RAM in my machine, an nix based own not an DOS-OS ;-) One thing i also would like to add in the "war" is .. Why did Microsoft build the registry? Whats wrong with cfg files just simple text based files.. its so easy ;-) Thanks for the thoughts and i think i buy some more RAM for my hey it still is an beautifull machine.... the G5 ;-)

One thing i also would like to add in the "war" is .. Why did Microsoft build the registry? Whats wrong with cfg files just simple text based files.. its so easy ;-)

Wait a second... Microsoft did it one way. Easy, sensible, reliable, would be a different way... didn't you just answer your own question?