Cool! I have never been able to up the bucket size in P5 without causing a crash, or a hung render, despite the fact that I have 2 gigs of high quality RAM. Well I can in P6, now my render speed is much faster! Yahooo!

Thanks for that. I wouldn't have thought of it because I had always crashed in 5 when upping the bucket size. Super.

Mine steps itself down if it's too big so I have it set at 512. YMMV.

This may be obvious, but if you have P6, use "keep textures loaded" and "reuse shadows," or whatever those settings are called; They speed up the inital phase of rendering a lot. Just be sure to uncheck "reuse shadows" if you move your figures around. I forgot to do that once, and the results were bizarre ... shadows in all the wrong places.

Other speed-up tips just occurred to me that may or may not be obvious: In Windows, Poser defaults to "normal" thread priority. CTRL+ALT+DELETE and choose Task Manager. Click on the "Processes" tab. Find Poser.exe in the list of active processes, right-click on it: "Set Priority" appears. Choose "AboveNormal" or "High." Choose "yes" when you get the scary scary message from Mr. Gates about changing process priority. This will work best (and be less likely to cause any conflicts or stability issues) if you're not running other programs (besides antivirus, firewall, stuff you need.) Don't be surfing the 'net at render time. Turn off iTunes, the new Beck album can wait. Don't rip CDs, don't watch DVDs. For those with less than 1GB memory, save your scene when you're ready to render, shut down Poser and restart your computer. On reboot, restart Poser and render before doing anything else. This is especially helpful if you've already rendered whole or partical scenes. You want your final render to be the first of your current Poser session, especially if you have multiple props or figures in the scene. And of course, defragment your hard drive once a month, especially if you do a lot of downloading, installing, and uninstalling. You know you do. All Poser addicts do. :-)

I was talking to a buddy about these memory issues yesterday, and he pointed out that it would be a good idea to enable the /3GB switch in XP's boot.ini. That will move all of the Windows system DLL's out of the lower parts of Poser's virtual address space, allowing to have more of the space for its own allocations. It's not much, but it's some. Does anyone know if P5 or P6 were linked with /LARGEADDRESSAWARE ?