I have just finished downloading Poser 8 and thought those who are undecided as whether to buy or not might be interested in my personal experience so far... bearing in mind that it is aimed at those with the same or similar systems as my own...

I am using a Core i7 975 Extreme 3.33 GHz... 8GB 1333 MHz DDR3 RAM... 2GB ATI HD4870 X2 Dual GPU.

Most importantly... I am running the latest pre RTM release of Windows 7 64 bit.

I say most importantly as I am sure many Poser users will be concerned as to whether or not Poser 8 will run on Windows 7.

The Smith Micro site makes no mention of Windows 7 under system requirements and my request for confirmation that Poser 8 would run in Windows 7 from the dev/beta teams in other threads went unanswered.

The short answer is... YES... at least on my particular system. But I see no reason why it wont run in Windows 7 on other systems if it will run on mine.

I chose to install just the Poser 8 program and have not as yet loaded in the new Poser 8 or legacy content.

Installation was a breeze... connecting to my existing Poser Pro runtime was a breeze.

So far I have not tried out any of the new bells and whistles in Poser 8 as my main concern was to see if it would run on my system with Windows 7.

I have loaded in several heavily populated PZ3 scenes previously put together in poser Pro and they rendered flawlessly and appeared exactly the same as when rendered in Poser Pro.

The good news is... that they rendered much faster in Poser 8 than they did in Poser Pro even though Poser Pro has a 64 bit renderer and Poser 8 doesn't. Probably due to the fact that Poser 8 is using all available cores more efficiently.

As I have said... I have yet to try out all the new features in Poser 8 but so far... I love the new UI and the responsiveness of the parameter dials... controls... etc.

Just my 2 cents worth so far :-)

"You don't have to be mad to use Poser... but it helps"