Attached Link: http://www.fileplanet.com/files/140000/140731.shtml

"isn't so wedded" eh? Oh but it is... You'd have to search the archives, but somewhere in there many months, (around the release of P5) ago, you will find a response from CL to me, on this exact question. "Firely" is a straight plugin, I forget the name, but it's a commercial product bought by CL and integrated, just like the hair and cloth stuff. P5 is and remains a cludge. I've been here a while, (though not of late) and I pre-ordered P5, I was here for the debacle that was the launch, and the coup detat that followed. Trust me when I say this, poser is that rare animal in the modern 3D world, a completely unnacelerated software only renderer. At the time P5 was released I had, (still have) a P4 2Ghz that I pought for P5, I bought a Radeon 9700pro and 1Gb of fast memory trying to speed the thing up, nothing worked. People who had overclocked PC's (one running at 3Ghz I think) suffered the same fate. The only thing that will make poser run faster, is a faster CPU, period. I will admit that I have all but given up on poser5, and when I had to sacrifice a partiton when XP died last time, it was the poser one that went. Poser is still not re-installed. I bear CL no ill will, I hope there is a P6, I honestly like the program, and the community that surrounds it, but I'd stake cash and body parts on the fact that it won't be a ground up re-write it'll need to be to benefit from today's fast video cards. The actual "posing" part of poser (the preview part) is integrated deeply with the rendering backend. To the point where they can no longer be seperated. Which is why CL plugged the "firefly" engine into the codebase, rather than replacing the old renderer with the new. "Modern games are not capable of comparable results in real time" Yes, they are. Watch the source (HL2) demo, or better yet, the UT3 engine demo (link) or this: http://www.gamespot.com/xbox/action/halo2/screens.html?page=88 Which is a multiplayer shot. It's a lowres mesh (lower res than the original halo mesh) that's beefed up by displacement maps to deform the mesh to make it look higher res than it actually is. Another new method I doubt will ever be used by poser. As for this "Game engines do look good -- on the surface." you should check this: http://www.usc.edu/dept/engineering/news/2004_stories/2004_06_15_desbrun.html "Experts in the field are giving this work high praise and imply that is will be immediately applicable to 3D modeling in games, movies, CAD and more." The rest of the world is moving on in leaps and bounds, we're the one's being left behind. Poser is not a "high end rendering system" and never will be, I doubt it will ever support stuff like HDRI (www.debevec.org) which the UT3 demo does, it's not capable of photon mapping (used to simulate sub surface light scattering) to provide translucent skin effects, etc. nor is it capable of "faking it" (http://www.ati.com/developer/gdc_video.html) I know this is a site for CL fanboys, and I'm not trying to knock poser, it's very good at what it does, I know I use it too. But the fact remains that poser simply cannot cut it with the big boys anymore. It's a hobbyist market, using an old program for the most part. But the Artisticly accomplished do postwork, which isn't something you do in realtime. As for DirectX, of course it looked the same, DX is backward compatible, which is why old games still run on even the latest version of DX9, they just don't use any of the advanced features. Though it is a good analogy, P5 was very much slower too. I don't want to rain on your parade but OpenGL is unlikely to ever see the light of day with Poser. later jb