destro75 opened this issue on Jun 30, 2005 ยท 30 posts
destro75 posted Thu, 30 June 2005 at 6:11 PM
Out of curiousity, since there have been so many hardware questions lately, I figured I would go straight to the source for some info. If you are at all interested in upgrading your hardware to help Poser perform better, read on. I removed the names to protect the innocent ;-)
On Wed, 29 Jun 2005 17:45:48 -0700, [I] wrote:
I do have a curiousity question you may be able to answer for me though. There are quite a number of posts I answer on Renderosity almost daily now regarding Poser's use of memory and the swap file. My theory is this, the total RAM on the system is not very important to Poser. I think Poser makes strong use of the swap file. If this is the case, would it make sense for people to get faster hard drives (for example, 7500 or even 10,000 RPM?) Also, I had a theory that it would make more sense for someone who is thinking about getting a 64bit CPU, instead going with a dual-CPU system. The way I figure it, two slower CPUs, with their distinct pipelines would be faster than one high-powered CPU. Lastly, quite a number of people feel they need newer video cards. I have seen others say that it doesn't make sense to get a newer card, since it doesn't really affect rendering. My thought on that is that it should only affect Preview Mode, and only if the card supports OpenGL. Do you have any opinions on this? Is there maybe something official that EF could tell the community that would help us all upgrade our systems to do better work? This would be really great if you could provide it. I know it would make a lot of people very happy.
In response from e-Frontier:
In answer to your questions regarding Poser 6's performance on various types of hardware, well, I could go on at length ;-) but I'll be as concise as I can while still providing useful data-
The video card you use generally won't have a major impact on your renders unless those renders consist mostly of preview-rendered animations. Firefly, the Sketch render engine and the Poser 4 engine all render entirely in software and make no use of the GPU whatsoever, so spending money on a high-end video card is wasteful for probably 75% of the work that people do. That being said, if your work consists mostly of animations for which an OpenGL preview render is adequate, then a high-performance video card may be a good investment; a tenth of a second's decrease in render time per frame can add up over the course of several 900-1200 frame animations, and the longer the sequence, the more time you'll save with a faster card. But this is only in that one particular case; for stills, sketches, toon renders or photorealistic video, the graphics card is basically irrelevant.
Typically there won't be a major speed difference between using a single-processor hyperthreaded machine and a (slightly slower) dual-processor system; a lot depends on the bus speed, the RAM speed and (as you noted so accurately) the speed of the hard drive. Poser isn't multithreaded, but the OS can route other, non-Poser processes to one processor while allowing Poser to tie up the other in rendering; Poser itself gets a slight speed boost but you'll see the benefits most in other apps which won't be as badly impacted by Poser's heavy processor use when rendering. You probably won't see as much benefit from a 64-bit hyperthreaded machine of equivalent speed- but there's the rub: most hyperthreaded or 64-bit chips run at a faster clock speed than dual-processor systems, so the difference gets made up somewhat. We have never really sat down and done a "Firefly shootout" between a 64-bit machine, a dual-processor machine, and a standard single-32-bit-CPU machine, although it would be interesting to see the results.
As mentioned above, hard drive speed does have a significant impact on Poser's performance, especially if you're unlucky enough to require the use of virtual memory. In any case, it's total throughput speed, not just rotational speed, that makes the difference. You should also make sure that your hard drive has adequate space and is properly defragmented, of course, and the bus speed also makes a difference. Poser uses the main system swap partition for its own swapping, unlike Photoshop and some other applications that allow you to determine which drive to use.
I'll post this information in our Poser Knowledge Base, so it'll be available for all to see.
I hope some of you find this information useful. I know I will!