You all have to realize that when the rubber meets the road the displacement maps and splines become hires models on the 3d card. The only difference is at what point does the model become a 3d mesh vs displacement map data or splines. Also, not everyone has a 3d card that does displacement mapping though that phasing out fairly fast. Then the displacement has to be done as a software render. Also don't be fooled by 3d card renders. A lot of those environments are actually very low poly count. Its the difference between a 3d artist and a good 3d game artist. Anyone can slap a bizillion polygons into a scene and render. It takes talent and skill to make a scene look better with just 3000 polygons. Also material efficiency is a key part of 3d game rendering. Everytime there is a material texture change or state change, the rendering pipeline has to stop to change states. A 3d card can boast 3,000,000 polygons per second but that's with no state changes. If every one of those polygons has a seperate texture and state, that performance drops in the toilet real quick. So a scene in Need For Speed might have 20 shapes with all their textures on one texture sheet to save state changes for example. Also the use of 3d game engines to create backgrounds for poser renders isn't a bad idea. Yeah perhaps poser should be displacement map based or spline based but look at it this way, animation master was spline based 4 years ago and did all the poser users jump over and use it? No. Poser is still the fastest and most efficient way to make 3d material in a timely fashion without reinvention. It has a huge support base of props, figures, clothes etc. Try making all that in Animation Master or 3d Max. Again, if these other methods are so great then why don't you see vast amounts of 3d max and Lightwave and AM stories and comics coming out? Its like construction. Fine someone's got a fancy new way to make a truss beam or make a wall, but, if its not efficient, quick and convienent and affordable, the construction Biz isn't going to switch over. We're still using 2x4s on 16 inch centers for the last 75 years and that doesn't look like its phasing out even though we also use aluminum joists, exotic materials and exotic techniques. Now if someone came out with a cheap package that did displacement maps as the rendering engine and built up a huge, massive support base of fans like poser has then I could see the despair.