When my P4 is minimized, it uses about 30% of the processor. This is very very bad. But the ProPack uses 97-100% This is totally unacceptable. Absolutely ridiculous and shoddy work. I've heard the same is true with P5? Haven't installed yet. But I do suggest that before Curious Labs even thinks about fixing the other bugs, they better kill this one dead and pronto. Then do a patch to fix the older versions.

It does seem rather inefficient. When you have to wait for a long time just to change windows in the program you know there are issues. Rendering is one thing but something like exiting the program probably shouldn't take as long as it does.

This doesn't happen to me.

I have ProPack SR3 running on OS:Win2000, Athlon 1GHz, 512MB SDRAM. Task Manager shows zero processor use when minimized and polling for input. Same is true for Poser 5-SR2.

Ian

Ian...then has anyone figured out what causes it? I'm using ProPack SR3 running on OS:WinXP, P4 2Ghz, 512 ram. Processor use when minimized varies from 97-100%. :( I can't live with this.

Some more checking reveals two things. (1) you must close the library palette (2) if you've been working a few hours it doesn't matter whether the palette is closed or not.

Thanks for the tip. P5 does need to go on a (memory) diet.

Is CL even looking at fixing issues that have been around since P4? From what I've seen, they seem to be concerned about adding new features and then trying to fix whatever the new feature broke. Maybe the memory usage (and multiple levels of Undo and a better interface and... ) will be included in Poser 6.

Spit,

Microsoft have acknowledged that there are some problems with reported CPU Usage levels in WinXP.

For info on this, go:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q317751

It might be worth searching the knowledge base for other related articles.

Ian

Even though Poser doesn't utilize dual processors, dual processors could still be the solution. If one processor was completly consumed by Poser then the other one could be used for other stuff.

Thanks Ian, but I just got WinXP a few months ago. This happened under Win98 too! That article refers to Explorer.exe which uses from 2-4% of the processor when idle on my machine and is no big deal. That's not it. It's Poser specifically. poser.exe in the task list.

I guess no one is considering those HUGE texture files that are being loaded in Poser. All those are using resources also. Just imagine several 4000x4000 textures using up all your memory. The last image I worked on had many textures. I added one last figure and Poser continually froze...that texture was 4000X4000. I reduced it by half, Poser rendered just fine, and I didn't see any different in the quality of the image. Now, when I get a texture that is HUGE, I automatically reduce it by at least half and have so far stopped Poser freezing up and using all my resources.

cherokee69 just curious about your ram size?

512MB

That's what I have but I've not been as luch as you. Mine will freeze up out of the blue among other problems.

Lapis, Check your texture sizes. Some of them are so big it makes you wonder why on earth what kind of system they were created on. I've had images where Poser wouldn't do anything when you click render. Then, using the same image, Poser worked fine after I reduced the texture size.

Lapis, Oh yeah, and don't forgot those god aweful huge bump files. Those things use more memory/resources than a huge texture file.

Yeah, the size of textures affects memory, but shouldn't have anything to do with processor usage when the program is idle.