The status of Poser

So sometimes I open my mouth, and I almost immediately regret it. I always mean well. Especially here, I am mostly just trying to share with all of you what's going on with me. What's happening, what I'm struggling with, what I'm thinking, and what's going well.

This situation with Poser is along those lines. 

I contacted Poser Support and I also posted on some of the forums to see if other people were having similar issues. Some people are having similar issues, but it was difficult to tell if they were the same issues as I was experiencing or just related.

What did happen though, is I ended up doing some more in depth testing of exactly what was going on with my system. The situation, thankfully, is not as bad as I had first thought. After the upgrade, I was in a rush to get work done. Poser crashing, and then having to do the upgrade, cost me a few hours of work. So I was madly trying to get stuff done, and I was seeing some very problematic behavior.

Anyway, you know most of that already. I did some more extensive testing over the course of last week, and I have found that the only real issue is my GTX 1080 Ti graphics card.

If I render using the CPU (or processor) in my machine then it works fine. Both of my remote machines only do CPU rendering, so both of my remote machines are actually fine. I thought they weren't at first because I was trying different render settings in an effort to figure out what was wrong. Those new render settings were taking way longer than normal, but I mistook that to be the same issue rather than a different issue.

If I use my "normal" settings, then rendering with the CPU is actually functioning properly.

Now I don't generally CPU render on my main machine for a few reasons: my GPU is faster, I can't use the computer at the same time, and Poser will occasionally crash. Because I'm using remote machines, the Queue Manager software has to run on my main machine to co-ordinate with my two remotes. If my CPU is running at 100%, which it is when it's rendering, then Poser will crash once in a while as one job finishes and Queue Manager has to hand the next job on the list to the remote machine. That takes CPU power, and the CPU is already at 100%.

Similarly, I can't really work on my main machine if I'm CPU rendering. Through this experience, I've found other people saying that doesn't happen on their machine. My machine isn't the most powerful out there, but it's no slouch. So I found that interesting, because my machine is nearly useless when I CPU render with it. I can't work in Clip Studio Paint, watch Joe Rogan on YouTube, watch Netflix, browse the web, or read comics. So that is a problem and makes CPU rendering on my main workstation problematic.

For those reasons, I invested in a fairly powerful graphics card: an Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti. In addition, it's just faster. It's not much faster than my i7-8700 K, but it is faster. My computer actually had a GTX 1050 Ti in it to begin with, and that card runs all of my monitors. I didn't change that. I left all my monitors plugged into the GTX 1050 Ti and just added the 1080 Ti.

That helps me continue to work, and even play games, on my main workstation when it's rendering. Because all the rendering happens on the GTX 1080 Ti. So naturally, that is the actual problem. :P

Here is where the story gets just a little bit odd. It works fine if I render on the slower GTX 1050 Ti. It even works fine if I tell Poser to use both graphics cards in tandem! The only time I have a problem is when I tell Poser to render solely on the GTX 1080 Ti, which is (as I pointed out above) 90% of how I render. My main workstation does the bulk of the work, while the two remote machines contribute only a little work each week.

This is a pretty serious issue, as renders with the 1080 Ti take ten times longer than normal. I was also wrong about my original estimations of the slow down. It's not two to three times longer, it's an order of magnitude slower.

So that's a problem, but not an insurmountable one. I can still CPU render, and I can render smaller scenes with both GPUs. See another reason I got a 1080 Ti is that it has 11 GB of RAM. You know all those city scenes in Bim U? Yeah, well the 1050 Ti won't even load those - they are just too big. It doesn't have enough RAM to handle those types of scenes.

Ultimately the problem has been narrowed down to the GTX 1080 Ti. Either my specific card or something on my machine to do with Poser and that graphics card. I've passed all of this, including the tests I did, on to Bondware and the Poser Support team. Hopefully they can figure it all out and program a fix to it.

Meanwhile, I can work but at a slower pace. I'm not giving up on Poser just yet, but I am going to add Daz into my workflow. I'll do some Poser comics and some in Daz until I either master Daz and move to it, or Poser fixes my current issue.

Something good did come of this though. Through the conversations I had on the Poser forums over at Renderosity regarding this issue, I have found better Render Settings that provide an equal or better result in Poser and are slightly faster than the settings I used to use for all of my comics.

So that's actually pretty cool. :)

I would also like to apologize if I caused any panic or anything. That wasn't my intention. I just wanted to share with my followers what was happening. I jumped the gun a bit, and things weren't as bad as I originally thought. I felt like I needed to let you all know as quickly as possible though, because the end of the month was looming so close.