skeetshooter opened this issue on Nov 15, 2006 ยท 8 posts
skeetshooter posted Wed, 15 November 2006 at 11:00 AM
With all due respect to PC users, who clearly comprise the majority of Poser users, P7 will be a gift from heaven for Mac users. It is as though P7 is being written mostly to please Intel Mac users, though I'm sure that's not the case. For us, it will be a much bigger improvement than for PC users, though they too should have reason to rejoice. I move my Poser 6 files almost daily back and forth between a Macbook Pro 2.33 Core 2 Duo with 2 gigs of RAM (at my office) and a 2.66 Mac Pro Quad Core with 4 gigs of RAM (at home). Although both run Poser 6 in Rosetta emulation and P6 does not take advantage of either multiple processors or more RAM, the Mac Pro Quad is notably faster and (perhaps owing to its better graphics card) has better previews. Whether that (P6 on an Intel Mac) is faster than a comparable PC, I doubt it. However... Poser 7 will make a HUGE difference -- something like 4 times the speed in routine operation, and 5-8 times faster renders -- on these two machines because it will be native Universal Binary Code, will take advantage of multiple processors and will be able to utilize more available RAM. I also expect it will be able to take advantage of 64-bit processing power of the Mac and its OS. My sense is that if you were ever tempted to convert from PC to Mac for using Poser -- no compelling reason until now -- Poser 7 and the new Intel-based Macs are astounding new reasons for doing so. Plus, you avoid all the inevitable headaches, bugs, viruses, lack of backward compatibility, and ridiculous hardware demands associated with moving to Vista. And you get a superior OS, with the flexibility (on Intel Macs) to boot to Windows or run it simultenously with the Mac OS. Mac Mini's start at $600, so price is no excuse to consider it. Does anyone know more about what e-frontier has in mind for its Mac version or changes that will benefit Mac users? Don't let us down, e-frontier!