So true, Tormie. With 3D, those are the by-lines.
My slant on this came as a result of a hardware failure mentioned in this thread. Since I had to build something new, I decided to look at (at the time) a high end gaming platform based on an AMD cpu. I compared the benefits of both the P4 and AMD's for the type of stuff I do, and decided the sacrifice of not having a P4 for office related stuff was worth it for the benefits of the graphics features of the AMD cpu.
I didn't get Poser until I had this machine up and running, so I cannot compare how it performed on a P4 (my last machine, which has been resurected) and the AMD. Besides the comparison would be slightly skewed now as both machines use different graphics cards and memory.
A month or so ago, I added another Gig of memory for a total of 3 gig. It did make some difference.
Poser does not use dual core processors. Although this is a disadvantage within Poser, I can and often have my modeling program or others capable of using both cores open along side Poser at the same time.
By the way, some time after my last post here, I discovered that the hard drive failure was really an unpublished incompatibility between the hardware firewall on the motherboard and chipset in the particular line of hard drives I was using. Since discovering this and switching HD lines, no problems.