I have been having problems with Poser 7 ever since I started rendering with IBL/occlusion. Since then if I rendered something bigger than 800x1000 the program would lock up. I knew that my computer had enough power and it shouldn't do that (especially since it rendered everything else all along fine). Anyway, long story short I was talking to someone at Smith Micro yesterday about Poser 8, wanting to find out before I got a new version how I could fix this. I happened to get (or they were talking to not sure which) the head graphic guy there and was told that the whole series of 8000s of geforce (I have the EVGA GeForce 8800 GT Superclocked 512MB) was bad with Poser and caused a lot of problems (which upsets me to begin with since this was never mentioned in requirements I went out and bought a new video when I bought Poser 7 before so it would work better because my system was old). Now I never heard any of this before, but whatever, if it fixes my problems...

Anyway, because of this I started searching on the forum people having problems with this series and found some information about adding Poser to the nvidia manager thing. (I also saw they were having similar problems I had had previously with Poser crashing for no reason which I thought before was a bug not the video card).  Anyway, this actually seemedto fix the problem, as I now have rendered at 1600x2400 and picture I never could before and am in the process of  rendering it at 2400x3000.

My question is, is over 3 hours normal for the first size render (not sure how long because I eventually went to bed and left it). The bigger one has been rendering for about I think like 7 hours maybe and it's still not done (though granted it's not locked up either which is a plus) I'm not sure if it should take that long or if it is because of the video card. I had mentioned to Smith Micro getting a geforce 9800 GTX+ and they said that was a recommended one but I'm thinking that changing the video card is not going to make a huge difference timewise and if I have taken care of the lockup problems it might be better to upgrade something else.  Right now I have a core 2 duo and 4 gbs ram and was thinking maybe I should get a better processor, but from reading things it sounds like maybe switching to vista 64bit could make a difference? (I  hope not I hate Vista this pc I'm talking about is XP). I don't have a lot of money right now so I'm probably looking at trying to figure out which one thing to upgrade would give me the most speed benefit. I'm also hoping if I upgrade to Poser 8 that will help with render times...

Any help is appreciated, thanks.