I am looking for some input here... Can any tell me if the ATI Radeon card or a Nvidia geforce will help with rendering time in Poser 5. I am working on a Mac G3 w/ 2Gig Mem with no GPU at this point. Anything would be helpful. Thanx All. Synpainter

It will not dencrease rendering time. It will decreaase the time it takes to navigate your scene. Open GL is for real time preview not high quality render. The Open GL implamentation in P6 is in its infacy so keep that in mind. (dont buy a psycho death card if you plan to upgrade computers in the near future) That said it is leaps and bound better than the P5 preview window!

Memory is the most critical issue. Poser 5 doesn't use open GL for anything, but Poser 6 does... mostly for preview. You might look at a Mac Mini if you are thinking of a killer card... incredible value, and I hooked it up to my old G4 and it accesses the Runtime just fine over firewire (I need to do proper networking when I can crawl around under the tables). You can't get one with 2 gigs of Ram yet... but the processor will be an improvement over that G3 and it is a sweet little machine. Carolly

Hey Carolly, Glad to hear you like your Mac Mini - never thought of a G4 as one big Runtime! ; - ) I agree that it would probably be a better value than a card for the G3.

Just recommended the mini to a PC colleague who had spare monitor, keyboard and mouse and within a day he was having a wonderful time putting his artwork, animations and music together in iDVD.

Can't wait for my P6 box to get here and try it on my G5 dual - Elisa/gryffnn

Two things for that G3: 1) RAM, and lots of it. As much as you can stuff in the box. 2) Hit up sonnet or Powerlogix and get an upgrade CPU to bring that puppy up to G4 specs and speeds. It's fairly cheap ($400 or less as opposed to the cost of a newer Mac), and they work fairly well. The only caveat is that your G3 box/logic board may not support it (still well worth a look though, IMHO.) /P

gryffnn, It is an older G4 with dual 450s. A nice tower which can take 4 hard drives. There are 2 in there (although the original has a bad spot and needs to be pulled), so it has growing room. By leaving 9.22 on it I can use MacConverter and MacInstaller and place things as I want them. The Mini has the iLife and other fun software. I didn't get the combo drive since the Dell I got from Deecey has a DVD burner already. It has 2 drives, empty except for Poser and the OS. With luck, I can keep both systems stable so that software which is platform specific such as MorphManager or UVMapper or MacInstaller call all be utilized as needed. with P6 allowing multiple Runtimes, I'm glad that the files can travel over the wires and not all have to be within one computer. In order to run even P5 on the Mac, I would have needed to get OSX, a better video card, and more RAM. This Mini is 3 times faster, for about what I would have needed to spend to upgrade. Deecey had originally got her Dell for video editing, so by combining the strengths of both systems, I might maybe get one of these mini-movies built, rendered, and burned. :) Carolly

Sounds like a terrific system. My husband has my old G3 400 with an extra internal hard drive and easily links to my G5 tower via Firewire target. He's got OS 10.3 installed and loves it. We don't get rid of old Macs - even have an old dual laptop set up as a phone answering system. The SE30 however has been honorably retired since our thumbdrive has a bigger drive : - ) I use MacConverter constantly for product development and send grateful thoughts just as often across the pond to MartinC. Wonder if he ever moved to OSX and if he considers rewriting his apps? Elisa/gryffnn

They have Objaction Mover for OSX out now (someone ported it), and I have yet to bother w/ MacConverter on OSX ever since I got hold of the free .png converter tool that's floating around in R'osity somewhere... forgot exactly where. Check the Mac forum for details (I posted the info in there somewhere recently...)

I ran both Classic/OS9 and OSX dual-boot in my old Cube - eventually I just stuck w/ OSX.

With the dual G5 tower, I haven't had a single regret over selling the Cube (and glad I sold it when I did... I got $700 out of it on eBay, less than a month before the Mac Minis came out. I doubt I would've gotten so much as $20 for the thing after that :/ )

/P

Message edited on: 03/24/2005 09:53

Yes, but without what they learned making the Cube, they wouldn't have been so succesful with the Minis.

The worst part is looking under the table and seeing all the cords needed for sharing peripherals. The Mini looks like it is sitting in a nest of snakes. Adding wireless and a base station would have been more money than what was essential. Maybe next time! Meanwhile, even legacy computers can keep some utility, and each was acquired because it has some strength.

Carolly

Message edited on: 03/25/2005 05:56