The only thing that keeps Firefly in P5 from being competitive with any of the afforementioned renderers (aside from Bryce) is Poser's crappy (and difficult to manage) lighting system. It's also very slow at raytracing, but so is Bryce. Anyway, it all depends on your budget. Vue has the best toolset for a relatively low cost, and is the most compatible with Poser scenes. 3dsMax 6 has a few different plugins that makes it compatible with Poser scenes and comes bundled with one of the industry's best raytrace engines (Mental Ray), but costs a small fortune (the same with Maya). Lightwave has a great built-in renderer with Radiosity and is the cheapest of the high end packages. Bryce has an old, slow renderer but can produce some stunning results if you have the time to wait for renders. I've heard people using Bryce actually waiting days for a render. Carrara has a great raytrace engine, is fairly easy to use, and has plugins that make it compatible with Poser. If you ever used the old Ray Dream or Dream 3D software years ago, you will be familiar with Carrara. However, Carrara has it's limitations compared to C4D or any of the higher end softwares, but can produce some great results as well. Most of the high end apps are compatible with PRMan, which is still one of the most widely used renderers in Hollywood movie FX. The materials in P5 is PRMan compliant as well. So it all depends on your budget, and how deep you want to get involved in 3D. ;-)

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Tools :  3dsmax 2015, Daz Studio 4.6, PoserPro 2012, Blender v2.74

System: Pentium QuadCore i7, under Win 8, GeForce GTX 780 / 2GB GPU.