Stupid question, but I'm going to ask it ANYWAY. I'm on a Mac. I use P4.0.3. Thru Classic. Yes, I'm bummed and tired of the speed hit, but I can't find any benchmarks about performance with Poser 5 under OS X. My setup: OS X 10.2.8 G4 450 (soon to be 1Ghz) with 1.25GB ram R7000 32mb AGP. I know vid cards don't mean squat to Poser, but it never hurts... Is it worth the $99 to upgrade? What kind of speed increase can I expect? Render time doesn't bother me...it's the posing speed I'm concerned with. PLus, I'd like to make my own Poser figures out of my Wings3D musings.

If you don't have ProPack, P5 will give you the setup room which IMHO makes creating your own figures a lot easier. Some folks swear by PHI files and grouping by hand, but I find the setup room much more convenient.

One source for speed benchmarks for P5X is in Burton's thread in this forum, in comparison to P5 Windows, and they indicated that it's about 3X faster on Windows machines. I haven't seen any comparison between P5X and P4Classic, other than subjective remarks that the Firefly renderer is slower than the P4 renderer, and that P5X bogs down frequently. My guess is that posing is about the same speed in P5X and P4Classic on the same machine, so the reasons to upgrade are the advanced renderer and shader functions.

My experience (G4 700, 1GB RAM) is that P4 is much quicker to pose in, particularly if the figure has lots of dials. In P5 I'd often get the spinning beachball. I mostly used P5 anyways, because of better renders, no bum-files that fill up the hard disk, better materials etc etc. Sometimes I would start posing the figure in P4 and then bring it into P5. Recently I got a G5 and Poser 5 is behaving quite nicely on it :)

Thanks guys. I'm holding off until I get me a WinPC 'step-child' for 3d work. Macs are wonderful for print, publishing and making movies, but seems to just suck when it comes to 3D. 3 times faster? GEEZ!

In the case of P5X, the original coders of P5X had a battle with Apple during the transition from P4, which was delayed 1.5 years after the Windows version due to the aforementioned intransigence. Try any other 3D apps and you'll see they are as fast as (and usually faster) on Macs with the same clock speed as Windows machines. So P5X is a special case of a dog-slow 3D app. I'm hoping the new owners of CL will totally rewrite the app for the 6 version, since trying to build on the current coding errors will be a big mistake. Personally I don't blame them for having trouble with the transition, because Puma and Cheetah were a pair of real dogs, in terms of all the problems they caused.

P5 ran much faster then I expected on my Titanium G4 with 800mhz and 1 gig of RAM. But my jaw dropped at the change to my G5 2.5ghz dual with 1.5 gig RAM. Bryce 5 as well. Although I've been told that many of the 3D companies haven't yet taken advantage of the 64 bit technology, the speed increase for me definitely warranted remaining on a Mac. Guess I just like being a rebel. ;)

ariannah, How are you doing with the MacConverter and MacInstaller utilities? Did Martin write OSX versions? That has been the only thing really holding me back from using OSX and upgrading my Mac. Carolly

Attached Link: Poser5 for Mac Converter

Hi Carolly,

I never have used MacInstaller (I install manually - must be nuts, lol!), but to use MacConverter, I have to use Classic mode. I really wish Martin would consider creating an OSX version as this is the only application I use Classic for. I even tried writing him once and offering to pay for an OSX version as well as spread the word to other OSX users. Unfortunately, I never heard back.

But recently, I purchased Poser5 for Mac Converter right here in the RMP by fmorgan. I haven't had a chance to try it out yet due to my crazy work schedule, but it is OSX native so I'm hoping I can make use out of it. The reviews from other Mac users were good so I decided to buy it. I'll include a link in case you're interested in checking it out.

I do know of one Mac user who uses MacInstaller in classic mode with no problems. For some reason, I never could get it to work properly as it kept asking for an older version of Poser which I've never had. I only have P5.

What I can say, is that the difference between using Classic and OSX for me, has been amazing. Believe me, I fought it for quite awhile, lol. but once I made the jump and gave myself a chance to learn OSX, I never looked back. It's incredibly stable, fast and well organized. I love the column view format where you can jump quickly to whatever folder or application you want. There's other things I've grown to love about OSX, but that's one of my favs. It's very user friendly and just makes sense. Besides, I don't think many developers are supporting the older OS's, so it was time to move with the times.

I hope this helps and I'd highly recommend upgrading!
Arry ;)

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=1955550

A litte utility program, included in the Unix part of OSX, can be used to install files. Kaveman wrote a wrapper for it, so it is easy to use - drag and drop. It will overwrite _files_ with the same name, but not folders - they will get the contents added. Read more at the link.

Posing w/ P4 ("Poser Artist") under Classic and Posing w/ P5 on my old Cube was roughly the same, performance-wise. Now, compared to my Pentium 4m-based PC (back when I last had Windows XP Pro on it), posing was slower on the Mac, but render speeds were roughly the same. The Cube had a 1.25GHz Powerlogix G4 on it w/ 768MB of RAM. The Intel box is a P4m 2.5GHz w/ 1GB of RAM on an Intel 845DB motherboard. Monday should see my dual 1.8 GHz G5 show up, and I received the extra 1GB of DDR2 RAM in the mail today. I suspect it'll run faster than the P4 ever did, at least judging by the few Pentium 4 vs. G5 benchmarks I've seen here and yonder. /P

The big gain of Poser 5 on the Mac IMHO was the stability gain. Whenever I'd set about rendering large scenes it would croke, or worse loose all the textures.

As far as the 3x faster issue I'm pretty sure that it comes down to how the G4 processor is designed. Classically Pentiums are thought of as being really good at dealing with integer calculations, PowerPCs chips are better at dealing with floating point numbers. Remember that the Altivec in G4's is a dedicated set of registers for dealing with floating point numbers, so if you feed the processor floating point calculations it can deal with them, essentially, in parallel with the other processor activies. The problem comes because there is no hardware means of converting a integer to a floating point number, so this needs to be implimented in the code. Because people don't think about processor differences sometimes, they forget that not actually optimizing the program for that processor (which is more than clicking on the optimize for G4 button in XCode) will result in it taking a serious performance hit.

Anyway, just my 2 cents, but I love P5 :-)

The best upgrade Ive ever done for poser was buying my dual 2.5G5!! Seriously, p5 is sooo much better, once you get the hang of it. I really like playing with the hair and material rooms.