Veritas; Nice screenshots. Now what kind of GPU was hiding under the hood? That water is pixel and vertex shader effects, not raytrace. Shaders -are- cool....but how many people here are capable of actually coding a shader tree effect straight into the GPU? For an example, look at Everquest. Far more people stayed with the original than ever messed with the 'new, improved' version, simply due to the ungodly hardware and connectivity requirements. TANSTAAFL, m'man. You pay to play, period, end of sentence. If not in time to perform a function, then in $$$ for the specialty hardware to speed things up. Poser, Bryce, and Vue are so popular =because= you don't need a state of the art system with a $500.00 video card to get quality. Just time, and patience. You can shove them onto an old P1 and get something done. Those screenies -had- to require a P4, and at least a GF-3, and probably GF-4 or Radeon 9000 class card. Possibly higher, if that is Shader 2.0. Stripped of all the buzzwords, this is still just pushing numbers around fast enough to produce an illusion of reality. Each discipline has tricks of the trade to increase that illusion, and there is very little real cross over. And frankly, I for one would =not= enjoy that 'instant gratification' world, for the simple reason that most of the work across the board would have to be done by preprocessing. This is approaching that 'Make Art' button concept people have hung around the low end apps necks. Would faster be nice, yes. Do I want all the nifty effects and goodies canned and ready for instant use? No. And the GMax forum is a good idea.... ;)