I don't understand why people keep thinking 3D card support is going to help with renders. This is why I think the forum needs a Myth Buster FAQ posted somewhere. 1. 3D Cards do NOT support all rendering features that software supports. Some do bump mapping, some don't. Some do Stencil buffer shadows, some don't. Cards do NOT do ray tracing. They do NOT do ray traced shadows. They do not support the multitude of shader options available in P5. 2. Even though apps like 3d max and Maya support 3D cards they do NOT do use such support on final renders. They can help with preview modes or renders where things are extremely simple but cannot do the final renders. That is always done with your CPU as a software render. Now they may open a openGL or DX window to out the pixels but that's about all. 3. As Cliff pointed out, it all depends on what you are rendering. Rendering a sphere with 2 or 3 shader layers is doable on a 3d card and faster. Ray tracing it won't work. Real world reflections won't work. 4. 3D applications such as games pull a heck of a lot of rendering tricks to get what they achieve. This means that what you see in a game is probably done in every single cheating, under handed way possible to get speed. For example, reflections in 3d games are NOT ray traced, they are done with another camera that simply takes a picture from the POV of the reflective surface. Car reflection maps are done with a snapshot and usinga cubic mapping. They may do this snap shot say every 20 frames or share the map with any close by auto. They may also cull a hell of a lot of scene info from the reflection map. A level in Unreal may look great but, if you look at the poly count, you'll find the number of visible polygons is less than 2000. So the bottom line is a comparison of a video game render vs a real render from Poser is not a fair comparison. Unless you want poser to cheat and not really render what you have in your scene and instead give you a quicky render that's sorta there (like the textured preview mode). 5. Most machine CPUs run faster than the processors on cards. This means even if you could cram all your information (like a V3 with 10s of thousands of polygons and those enormous 4096x4096 maps people use) onto some poor card's 128 megs of ram, the GPU won't accurately render as fast as your pentium CPU chip anyway. If people can't get their scene rendering in P5 with 1.5 gigs or 2 gigs of on board ram, what makes anyone think this same scene is going to run in a video card's 128 meg ram space?