Forum: Poser Technical


Subject: top computer requirements??

shadowangel opened this issue on Sep 30, 2009 · 2 posts


shadowangel posted Wed, 30 September 2009 at 3:26 AM

hi everybody i got a odd question too. grins..
I ame building a computer just extra for my poser 7.. like its getting its own bedroom lol.
so is there a possibility to make a computer good enough that i could use firefly renders turned up all the way ?? my old computer always crashes just if i turn it up half of the way here are the specs of new pc..
intel quad core 8500 with intel chips
4 gb ram but able to stock up to 20 gb ram
gforce 9900 graphic card with 1 gb ram.
wanted a overclocked pentium i7 quad core but thats really expensive
doese anybody think this would help me to achieve my goal ???
poser is so extreme is there really anything that lets poser run turned up all the way ??
thanks in advance


svdl posted Wed, 30 September 2009 at 10:01 PM

Poser 7 can't use more than 4 cores, so an i7 won't help. A Q8xxx will be just as fast at a lower cost.
I'd suggest installing 8 GB of RAM right away, plus a 64 bit OS, preferably Windows 7. Windows XP 64 bit is also a good choice, but I'd advise to avoid Vista.

A fast graphics card is very useful for scene manipulation and preview, but Firefly (like almost all render engines) renders on the CPU, not the graphics card, so a fast graphics card won't help one iota during the production render.

You don't need that much RAM on your graphics card for Poser. 512 MB is more than enough.

You could consider a Velociraptor hard disk for your operating system and program files, plus a nice big secondary drive for your runtime libraries (Samsung Spinpoint F series, 750 GB or 1 TB, 7200RPM are fast, reliable and affordable). Spreading the load over multiple disks won't let you render at higher quality settings, but it will let you render faster.

Also consider upgrading to Poser Pro Base. The FireFly version of PoserPro Base is a true 64 bit application and can use far more than 4 GB of RAM (128 GB, as far as I know). That's where the extra RAM kicks in. You don't actually NEED it - a large page file can also cover Poser's need for memory, but those extra gigabytes mean that a large complicated render at high quality has a good chance to finish before you run out of patience.

Poser 7 FireFly is limited to 3 GB under a 32 bit OS, and 4 GB under a 64 bit OS. And it's these memory limitations that prevent you from rendering large scenes at maximum quality.

Actually, upgrading to Poser Pro and running a 64 bit OS is the only way to render complicated scenes at high quality settings.

Last, but not least: that "quality" slider on the "automatic" page isn't all that useful. I always use the manual settings to get a good tradeoff between render speed, memory usage and render quality, and generally my settings are quite different from what the "automatic" settings provide.

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