caffeineguy opened this issue on Aug 08, 2005 ยท 11 posts
caffeineguy posted Mon, 08 August 2005 at 10:27 AM
A question for the group. I am running a Dell P4 3.2 gig processor with 512M of RAM and a 64 G Force Card. Is it better to upgrade the ram or the card to get better performance out of P5? Just wondering CG
zulu9812 posted Mon, 08 August 2005 at 10:32 AM
RAM, without question
randym77 posted Mon, 08 August 2005 at 10:34 AM
Upgrade the RAM. Your graphics card doesn't matter at all to Poser 5. It doesn't use video RAM to render or anything. Besides, you really could use more RAM.
AntoniaTiger posted Mon, 08 August 2005 at 10:42 AM
The video card is almost totally irrelevant. It would have to be really ancient to make a difference to Poser 5. My experience; 512M of RAM is barely adequate. By Windows XP the OS is using enough that it doesn't take much to start disk swapping and Poser gets horribly slow (but XP is more stable). So I'd go for more RAM. (Poser 6 uses OpenGL for some features and the graphics card does make a difference there.)
caffeineguy posted Mon, 08 August 2005 at 11:04 AM
Cool, thanks. I would do both, but my budget does not allow it. Thanks for the advice. CG
SoulTaker posted Mon, 08 August 2005 at 1:20 PM
ram
aeilkema posted Mon, 08 August 2005 at 1:21 PM
I'll just tag on, RAM for sure, Poser 5 hardly makes use of you gfx card.
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garblesnix posted Mon, 08 August 2005 at 2:26 PM
So glad I stumbled onto this thread. I just got 1GB of memory on my PC (fomerly known as 512MB) this weekend.
I toyed with the idea of adding a killer graphics card (more, bright, shiny, more, new, more) but decided to wait and do some research.
Youse folks saved a poor boy lots of time.
Thanks.
Message edited on: 08/08/2005 14:27
danamongden posted Mon, 08 August 2005 at 4:05 PM
Definitely RAM. On my last machine purchase, I bit the bullet and got 4GB, and not a day has gone by that I've regretted it. With that much RAM, not only do big renders go faster, but my machine is actually usable during the render. I'm doing a render right now with 12 other windows open, and the hard disk is not thrashing/paging at all.
zulu9812 posted Mon, 08 August 2005 at 4:24 PM
I thought that Poser doesn't actually use more than 1GB of RAM? Am I wrong?
danamongden posted Mon, 08 August 2005 at 4:35 PM
In my tests, Poser 5 and Poser 6 will use close to 2GB of RAM. (Actually, in many tests, it would run into problems around 1.7GB or so, but I suspect that was due to heap fragmentation.)
What I wanted (and got) with the 4GB of RAM in the system is some leeway. Poser can go up to its RAM limit without running up against the limits of the system. Remember that the OS and other programs are using memory, and while you can shut down other programs, key aspects of the OS will never get swapped out. The extra RAM lets Poser eat as much as it can without ever running into a swapping condition.
Message edited on: 08/08/2005 16:36