Hi all -

My old Win 7 Pro system with an OC'd AMD Phenom x6, 8GB RAM, and GTX 1050 Ti 4 GB is dying, and too old to even run a current web browser capable of doing a forum search here or properly viewing all features of this website... which is why I'm starting a new thread on an old topic.

I was going to upgrade to Poser 13 to use a modern Nvidia card for much faster Superfly rendering... until I read that P13 won't natively work with V4/M4 and their relevant clothing, hair, character morphs, MATS, etc. -- which I have hundreds of and use the most. I also read that P13 no longer has the simple material room -- which works great for my needs. I've watched many Rendo videos on how to use the advanced material settings but I still don't understand it all. So, I'd like to stay with P11 (or P12?) if that is the last version that has native support of the V4/M4 characters, their accessories, and simple MAT room.

I do have some primary questions:

Does P12 fully support CUDA/OPTIX GPU rendering while ALSO supporting legacy DAZ characters AND still have the simple MAT room settings? If so, I'd certainly make that upgrade.

If I keep using P11, is there an easy to use companion app for using GPU rendering with an Nvidia or perhaps a Radeon GPU?

What CPU to buy? I've read conflicting opinions here regarding Intel Vs AMD chips and core/thread count Vs CPU speed -- and talk that Poser prefers single core/thread speed -- yet plenty of users here swear by AMD high core/thread count CPUs?

Do P11 or P12 work with Windows 10/11?

What I DO seem to understand is that I should use low-latency DDR5 RAM of at least 32GB and even up to 96GB of it, and a motherboard mounted solid-state drive for the OS... should Poser be on the same drive?

Sorry for all the questions. Even when doing Google searches on this topic seeking Rendo forum threads, there were no hits.

Thanks!

Kent

Poser 13 absolutely works with V4/M4 and all their variations. You may have heard that Genesis figures don't work. That's because DAZ has never updated their DSON Plugin. It relies on Python 2 which ended support nearly 10 years ago. It's too much of a security risk to continue with Python 2.

All your V4/M4 content will still work. The easiest way to migrate is to Copy the entire content library (the runtime folders) to the new computer. There's no need to spend days (weeks) reinstalling ever item.

Poser 12 and forward rely on Python 3 for scripting.

The simple material room is gone from P12-13 because it was incompatible with modern materials and the newer versions of the SuperFly render engine. The simple room will return in Poser 14 but it will not be able to Import SuperFly node style materials. It's just not possible to represent what can be done with the SuperFly implementation of Cycles with 8 image tiles and couple of check boxes. The full feature set for the new simple room is still in development. Trying to parse shader trees with masses of nodes is definitely off the table. Even if we tried it would be janky at best.

Poser 12 Supports Nvidia RTX 20xx and 30xx cards. Poser 12 does NOT support Optix. Optix didn't even exist back then.

Poser 13 Supports all current RTX cards. Poser 13 Does support Optix which is insanely fast. I benchmarked it at 40 times faster. Not percent. A 40 minute render is now a 1 minute render.

GPU rendering is only supported for SuperFly rendering. FireFly render engine can not take advantage of hardware rendering.

CPU: Many of Poser's processes are single thread. Posing, preview performance, dynamic cloth and hair. These are single thread processes. Multithreading does nothing for them. Base clock speed and single core performance is still a major concern.The CPU also has to feed the scene data to the GPU. The biggest bottleneck here is the PCI bus make sure you have a mainboard that can support full 16 lane PCI for the GPU slot. (Just because it has a 16x slot doesn't mean all the lanes are populated.)

The place a lot of CPU threads will benefit is FireFly renders. If you're planning on sticking with FireFly lots of cores is important. FireFly tops out at 32 threads. Any more than that would have no benefit. Even at 32 threads memory bandwidth and HDD/SSD speed would be the bottle necks at that p oint.

Memory no less than 32 GB. After that the more the merrier until you run out of money.

All versions of Poser require Win 10 or newer and an x64 CPU. ARM64 Doesn't currently work. Probably in the future.

I recommend having a physical drive that;s just Poser content. Especially if your a collector. A terabyte of content seems like a lot until it's not enough. When you move into the new system you can copy all your existing content runtimes to the new drive and then link them in to Poser.

I’m wondering the same kind of thing about poser 11, 12, or 13. But I’m on a Macintosh. With the new OS 26 Tahoe, which version of poser would work best? I have poser 10 and 11 on my Macintosh. I haven’t bought pose at 12. I was wondering if those 13 would work better. I’ve been hearing that pose of 14 will not work with a Macintosh. Mainly, now, I use. DAZ Studio.

So, does anybody know about OS 26 Tahoe, and which version of poser might actually work?

What you might have seen regarding the Daz figures not working is that Poser 13 was planned to support a rigging feature called unimesh, where figures were no longer cut apart as part of the rigging process. This fell through. There was a misunderstanding since Daz calls their legacy figures unimesh, meaning they all started with the same geometry. 

Also, if you are planning on using Superfly and Optix rendering, I recommend as much VRAM as possible if you do highly populated scenes. I have 12 GB and will run out at about 10 figures.

inquire posted at 4:14 AM Sun, 21 September 2025 - #4500008

I’m wondering the same kind of thing about poser 11, 12, or 13. But I’m on a Macintosh. With the new OS 26 Tahoe, which version of poser would work best? I have poser 10 and 11 on my Macintosh. I haven’t bought pose at 12. I was wondering if those 13 would work better. I’ve been hearing that pose of 14 will not work with a Macintosh. Mainly, now, I use. DAZ Studio.

So, does anybody know about OS 26 Tahoe, and which version of poser might actually work?

I stopped the render on my Mac after 5 minutes and only 25% computed.
Any Windows PC with an RTX 4070 will compute it in 30 seconds.

A configuration to consider: your Mac being the master, a win11 installation with no access to the internet (=> no updates....), in the same network, with a decent RTX 4070. It will compute for your Mac through the Queue Manager. 
But don't forget: Apple being Apple, Poser 14 will not run, because of... Apple.

In my case, I use my Mac for Logic Pro which is a pure gem, and Youtube as the Mac generates no noises. But Poser is on Windows, till the day it runs natively on a Debian distribution 

Thanks guys for the helpful info!

@ Nerd:

It's nice to hear P13 will work with my V4/M4-centric content, and with the right CPU/GPU and amount of RAM/VRAM, Optix could meet or exceed DS IRAY render speeds in SuperFly renders!

Re: "The simple material room is gone from P12-13 because it was incompatible with modern materials and the newer versions of the SuperFly render engine. The simple room will return in Poser 14 but it will not be able to Import SuperFly node style materials. It's just not possible to represent what can be done with the SuperFly implementation of Cycles with 8 image tiles and couple of check boxes."

Will P13-14 correctly render the older character, clothing, and Prop MATS I have, (whether SSS or Non-SSS), some dating back well over a decade?

Re: "Poser 13 Supports all current RTX cards. Poser 13 Does support Optix which is insanely fast. I benchmarked it at 40 times faster. Not percent. A 40 minute render is now a 1 minute render."

I've read a lot of good things about the RTX 5070 12GB, even though some of its new features only favor gaming. But I'm wondering if an older 40xx Ti series with a faster GPU clock speed, more VRAM, and a wider 256 bus width (versus the 5070's 12GB VRAM on a 192 bus) would render much faster in P13 or P14? I seldom render a scene with more than two characters or four lights or a complex mix of background and props. I'm just looking for fast SuperFly GPU render speeds and enough CPU speed and core/thread counts to greatly improve FireFly render speeds...

Re: "CPU: Many of Poser's processes are single thread. Posing, preview performance, dynamic cloth and hair. These are single thread processes. Multithreading does nothing for them. Base clock speed and single core performance is still a major concern. The CPU also has to feed the scene data to the GPU. The biggest bottleneck here is the PCI bus make sure you have a mainboard that can support full 16 lane PCI for the GPU slot. (Just because it has a 16x slot doesn't mean all the lanes are populated.)

The place a lot of CPU threads will benefit is FireFly renders. If you're planning on sticking with FireFly lots of cores is important. FireFly tops out at 32 threads. Any more than that would have no benefit. Even at 32 threads memory bandwidth and HDD/SSD speed would be the bottle necks at that point."

For many years Intel seems to have strong-armed video editing/rendering program companies (and maybe 3D Art companies too?) into writing code that favors ONLY their  chips' architecture, and so with this system build I'd already resigned myself to having to pay more for their CPUs and supporting MoBo chipsets. But after hearing about Intel's financial troubles and needing Trump to bail them out, I don't know if that has made their recent CPUs as competitive as in the past.

I also see no shortage of Poser enthusiasts here having success with mid-to-higher-end AMD CPUs. So, what's a good mid-to-upper level AMD CPU with sufficient single-threaded performance and clock speed to make P13/P14 SuperFly happy and enough threads to significantly improve FireFly render speed?

Re: "I recommend having a physical drive that's just Poser content. Especially if your a collector. A terabyte of content seems like a lot until it's not enough. When you move into the new system you can copy all your existing content runtimes to the new drive and then link them in to Poser."

When you mention a "physical drive," are you talking about a SSD -- or will an older 7200 RPM HDD be okay for this purpose? (If it will LET ME -- see below.) I do plan on using an SSD for the C/Drive OS and Poser 13 app.

I currently have my Poser 11 content on C/ Public Documents, AND the character/scene creation .pz3 files located on C/Poser/My Documents -- because that was the only configuration I could get to work. And, then only when I let the DAZ Installer set it up to work on my current AMD X6 Win 7 64 Pro system. I previously had Poser 9 running just fine on an Win XP 32 Corporate OS and AMD X4 Phenom II system with all my content on a separate HDD. Hopefully, Poser 13 will install NORMALLY on a new Win 10 or 11 system.

@RedPhantom:

Thanks for the info about the differences in unimesh, and 12 GB of VRAM handling up to 10 characters!

@Y-Phil:

"I stopped the render on my Mac after 5 minutes and only 25% computed.
Any Windows PC with an RTX 4070 will compute it in 30 seconds."

That is good to know about the 4070's render performance!

In my case, Win is on its own SSD, and no other program (at least keep that number as low as possible).
Any program is installed on a classic hard drive, not on the OS drive.

My Poser executables (11 & 13) + the whole collection of runtimes are on a 2nd SSD, with 2 TB, while all Poser projects are stored by Poser version in a dedicated structure, on a classic Hard Drive.

Once I moved all Poser runtimes onto an SSD, I noted that Poser was loading seemingly faster

Thanks for that useful info, Y-Phil! I hope P13 will install that way on my new PC.

GPU: 5070 will be good. Maximized VRAM. If the entire scene can't fit in GPU memory it won't render. (Fails so spectacularly that Poser needs to be restarted.)

Rendering legacy content: Poser still has the FireFly render engine. Older content that's not made for PBR should be rendered in FireFly. It's designed to work with the materials of the day. FIreFly can't take advantage of GPU rendering. So if this is a big point for you CPU "performance" cores are the bigger point.

Physical disk: Any device SSD, HDD, 9 track tape, punch cards. Just make it separate from the boot drive. That way the next rime you upgrade all you have to do is move that device to the new box. Also get an external with enough space to hold all your data including the OS and apps. This can be a HDD, This is your backup. Online backups like OneDrive are impractical if you have the mass amounts of data that 3D artists trend to have. One Drive is fine for a few cat pictures and your resume. 6TB of content and renders, nope. Takes a year, literally to create the backup unless you have gigabit fiber internet. Terabytes of online storage is kind of expensive too.

If you can afford it, you may also use a NAS as separate device for backups, and to store your whole collection of stuff you've bought. In may case, I'm storing on it the HDRi's, too.

Yes and speaking of NAS that brings up network. Highly recommend a wired local network connection between anything like a NAS. Or an old PC put out to pasture and pretending to be a server. 

Most modern routers are going to be 1000 Mbps or "Gigabit" for the wired connection, WiFi 802.11be tops out at 46 Gbps, in laboratory conditions ...

So, if you choose to make your self some sort of network storage for all your content you'll probably want to make sure your local net is up to speed too. As with all things computer you can only go as fast as the slowest component.

Sorry guys... I thought this thread was dead and so stopped checking, plus the email notice of your replies went into my spam folder... so thanks for the additional info!

I'm ordering parts for this build and so far bought a great combo deal on a Ryzen 9 7900X / MSI AIO 3x 120mm fan radiator cooling solution. This CPU has 24 threads, 12 MB L2 / 64 MB L3 cache, idles at 4.7 Ghz, and boosts to 5.7 Ghz under load at the stock clock speed -- so should have decent single core performance -- AND great multithreaded performance for P13 / P14 FF renders.

I'm ready to order an MSI B650-A ATX motherboard (https://www.newegg.com/msi-pro-b650-a-wifi-micro-atx-motherboard-amd-b650-am5/p/N82E16813144665?Item=N82E16813144665) with a 14/2/1 phase VRM setup and dual 8-pin CPU power feeds for an 80 amp +12v supply. The only concern is it lacks a Gen-5 x16 Primary GPU slot. The few extra PCIe lanes this board's A-version of the B650 chipset added was used for an extra Gen-4 4x M2 slot instead of a Gen-5 PCIe x16 GPU slot. However, I read at Tom's Hardware there is very little loss in effective performance when running even a high-end Gen-5 RTX GPU in a Gen-4 (or even a Gen-3) x16 PCIe slot. At least for gaming... maybe this doesn't apply to 3D image GPU rendering?

Based upon a fairly recent post by Nerd regarding RTX GPU selection for Poser 13, he states: "Yes all that really matters is that it's a RTX and how much dedicated memory it has. RTX anything with 8 GB will render circles around any thing less. Going up from a 20xx to a 50xx will only get you incremental increases in performance. Getting on any RTX is revolutionary. Money is better invested in a 20xx or 30xx with more memory than a 50xx because it's "new."

If this advice still holds true, I'm planning on buying a Gen-4 RTX 3060 12 GB 192-Bit GDDR6 card because I really don't want to spend almost double that on a RTX 5070 Gen-5 card. For the same price as a RTX 3060 12 GB, I could instead buy an RTX 5060 8 GB  Gen-5 card -- which Tom's Hardware says will run circles around the 3060 12 GB GPU in GAMING benchmarks, and which has a faster clock and more CUDA cores... but it only runs the VRAM at 128 bits. I DON'T do any gaming so only care about P13/P14 SF render performance -- especially with Optix. So would I do better with a RTX 3060 12 GB card in this situation? I seldom create Poser scenes with more than one character, 5 lights, or a very complicated background. Maybe I don't even need 64 Gigs of system memory?

I'm scrambling to buy decent CAS-30 6000 DDR5 memory (2x 32GB Dual-Channel RAM for a nice future-proof 64GB) and M2 SSD(s) before the prices surge any higher due to the "supposed" Q4 shortages caused by massive increases in AI render farms... It's always SOMETHING... First floods in Asian silicone fabs 8 years ago, then DIY crypto mining platform HW shortages, then the pandemic, and NOW AI !!!!

At least the Poser 13 upgrade prices continue to have occasional 50%-off sales and more are likely to occur as the Black Friday and other related sale events approach...

Speaking of PCIe generation: my actual GPU is an RTX 4070 OC, a gen4. But before my actual PC, I had one with a Gen3 PCIe and the actual 4070 worked perfectly fine. Just at the speed of the PCIe Gen3 speed for what concerns the transferts of data between the proc and the gpu. For what I understood, it doesn't concerns the computing speed within the gpu itself. So that I'm not sure that there's a really huge difference.

Y-Phil -- That's good to hear you are having good results with a Gen-4 RTX 4070, and even before that on different platform running a Gen-3 bus!

Psych2 posted at 5:15 PM Fri, 10 October 2025 - #4500541

Y-Phil -- That's good to hear you are having good results with a Gen-4 RTX 4070, and even before that on different platform running a Gen-3 bus!

If this advice still holds true, I'm planning on buying a Gen-4 RTX 3060 12 GB 192-Bit GDDR6 card because I really don't want to spend almost double that on a RTX 5070 Gen-5 card. For the same price as a RTX 3060 12 GB, I could instead buy an RTX 5060 8 GB  Gen-5 card -

Yes, this is absolutely the situation I'm referring to. Your money is better invested in more GPU memory. If the entire scene can't fit in the GPU the render will fail. The 12 GB card is the best choice. Aside from that, the Gen 5 RTX cards have had numerous problems from blowing caps to melting power connectors, Even a few cases of catching on fire from over heating.

Technically you reach a point where the returns of faster GPU speeds diminishes to nothing. The bottle neck to render speed is no longer the actual render. It takes longer to send the scene to the GPU than it takes to render it. Think of it this way. In most modern video games it takes a few seconds to "Load the map". Once the map is loaded the GPU can render literally 60 frames per second or more. That loading time is the time takes to send all the geometry to the GPU's memory. Every time you render Poser has to send all the data to the GPU. That crossload time in many cases is longer than the actual render.

The PCI bus is now the bottle neck. It has to transfer all the geometry and textures from main memory to the GPU memory through the 20 year old PCI bus architecture.

To solve that we're perusing a way to cache the entire scene in the GPU memory. Maybe someday.

@Nerd - thanks for confirming that the 3060 card with its 12GB of VRAM would be the better choice compared to the RTX 50xx cards.

While the aging PCI bus becomes the rendering bottleneck these days, I have a feeling I won't be disappointed with 40x faster P13-14 Optix based SF renders... or much faster FF renders with a 24-thread CPU @5.7+ Ghz. This new platform will also have 64GB DDR5 Cas 30 6000 RAM and a 2GB Samsung 990 Pro Gen-4x M2 SSD boot drive... quite a boost over my current 15 year old AMD X6 CPU (OC'd to 3 Ghz), Nvidia 1050 Ti 4GB GPU, 8GB DDR2 RAM, and 7200 RPM HDDs. All the parts should arrive next week and hopefully the build will go smoothly.