Ok good people, let me tell you what I'm workin' with first: AMD Athlon 64 2800+ 1.80GHz, 224MB of RAM. What would you all recommend for someone who is about to upgrade from Poser 4.03 to 6? I've read some of the posts about technical problems with 6 and that its a "jealous" program, (LOL, I li'l joke I use for programs that want to be the only one open smile like Photoshop CS) Probably an even better question is what can I brace myself for when I want to transfer my library, some free items and some purchased, like the geometries folder items especially -Oh Lord- over to it? How much RAM do most of you have that REALLY use it? Oh yeah, are the newer figures compatable with any of the Daz 3D figures texture wise andor items wise, you know Mike and Vicky (3)? Yes I know I seem to have so many, but one last one: What is Open GL, I'm ashamed to ask, and how would having or using for the graphics thing affect Poser 6? I onced used Poser 5 demo on my old system (if I told you what it was, YOU'D LAUGH....seriously I'd been using it since sometime in 2001, I think), and it took me awhile, but I kinda got the hang of it, I just hated that you had to go through so much red tape just to render, so I expect it to be complicated as well and slowwwwed it down to a snail so since I have a newer system I'm hoping for the best.... Thanx all.

1. buy RAM. Buy some more ram. no no more. haha. Poser 6 will use as much ram as you have less ram means it goes to hard drive for memory use and that is really slow and can cause crashes. 2. few bugs, stable applications, there are work arounds and it's a god program. Poser 6 doesn't take over anything in fact you can keep your poser 4 and access the poser 4 runtime in poser 6 so no worries. Daz figures that use INJ probably need to be installed in the default poser 6 runtime due to INJ and the way it works. 3. I had on a desktop 768mb ram (puter died recently), laptop which I am using now has 2 gig of ram, that was the most I could throw in the box. more ram is good get as much as you can. 4. Daz figures are compatible with Daz figures. New Poser 6 Jessi and James do not take Daz textures. Poser 5 Don and Judy figures take Mike2 and Vicki 2 textures. 5. open gl is a way to see textures and handle graphics when displayed, think rendered real time image in the poser window without rendering, though it ODES have limitations. It can be turned off if your video card does not support open gl. check with your vid card maker to see. 6. any new program has a learning curve, I like poser 6 but to me it is overly complicated in certain areas and simple in others. depends on your learning curve and apptitude. 7. faster cpu, lots of memory and large fast hard drives will help poser 6 perform better, will help poser 4 also so its not bad to get the best bang for the buck you can. hope all that helps in some way.

Make sure you have a good video card with the latest drivers. I would recommend something by Nvidia, the newer the better. I also wouldn't NOT tranfer you libraries, but rather just keep them in the folders where they are at now and just link them to Poser 6 through the Poser 6 program. 1 gig of RAM seems to work okay for me, but if you are doing complex scenes, a lot of people think 2 gigs helps. Open GL is used in Poser 6 to give you a preview mode that looks more like the final render. This is mainly why you need the Nvidia card, because GL works best with this card.

The only part of the DAZ figures that has to be in the default runtime is the !DAZ directory in your libraries. once you get p6 Move all your MAT pose files to your material directory and rename them to .mc6. uninstall P4. live happly ever after.

"This is mainly why you need the Nvidia card, because GL works best with this card." Sorry to kill an old urban legend, but I've learned (at my dear monetary expense) that OpenGL support IN POSER (mind me, I'm not speaking of games or other 3d apps) is VERY BAD if compared with even a relatively "old" Radeon 9800 Pro video card. I've thrown away 250 bucks for a geFarce 6800 line card only to regret my decision and putting back in the PC my trusty ATI one...

My ATI 128mb laptop vid works great for poser 6 in open gl.

With all of this good advice here is some more: 1. You do need a fast cpu 2. You could definitly use up to 2gig of RAM 3. You DO NOT need a gaming video card, a nice NVidia with 128MB RAM is sufficient. Poser doesn' like some of the gaming settings. 4. Either install Poser to it's own hard drive or partition, installing to an external hd might give you a problem. Makes Poser happy. 5. Make sure you have some good fans, both for the cpu and the chassis, when rendering the temperature will rise.

That Athlon CPU is pretty good. A graphics card with good OpenGL support is nice, but not essential. More RAM is definitely essential. Go for at least 1 GB, more is better. A fast harddisk sure helps. More on graphics cards: nVidia is a bit of a letdown with their later consumer series. Great gaming cards, but the OpenGL support isn''t as good as it could be. My old Ti4200 performs almost as well as the my new Geforce 6800LE under OpenGL (DirectX is another matter). Another system with an ATI9600Pro has had quite a bit of OpenGL troubles. If you're going to use this machine as a graphics workstation, and you have the money, you could go for a nVidia Quadro board. Expensive, but excellent OpenGL support (you'll love it if you also work with other 3D apps that make extensive use of OpenGL, like Vue or modeling apps). They're NOT good for gaming. But your first priority should be RAM. Next, a second harddisk.

If I only had the money I'd be very tempted to get a SCSI HD.

SCSI HD for performance? I wouldn't advise that. The regular SCSI drives are no faster than their IDE counterparts. They are more reliable (a 5 yr guarantee is quite common for SCSI, 1 year is common for IDE). And they're three times as expensive as their IDE counterparts. You'd also need a SCSI controller, plugged into a PCI slot, and the PCI bus then becomes the bottleneck. If you want a fast SCSI controller, you'd also need a server mainboard with a PCI-X (not PCI Express!) bus. Very expensive. I haven't seen PCI Express SCSI controllers yet. The really fast SCSI drives (Seagate Cheetah) are even more expensive. If you want a FAST drive, go for a Western Digital Raptor. 10,000 RPM, 3 yr guarantee, SATA150, so it can be installed on any recent PC. Sort of a "poor mans SCSI" I've got two 73 GB Raptors in my newest rig, and they are blazingly fast indeed.

What you just said is true, going over to SCSI would be very cost prohibative. I'm going to have to do some reading up on SATA, been away from hardware way too long.

Don't let these guys scare you. Sure, a bigger more expensive computer will give you faster results, no doubt about that - but my fastest computer is a 2GHz cache-crippled Celeron with a 5400 rpm IDE drive and a cheap nVidia FX5200 card, and I can pose too ;) RAM is useful, though - my Poser 6 box says 256MB required, 512MB recommended - you want these 512MB, or more. And make sure you use Windows 2000 or XP.