"I dunno, with Poser's skin shaders, SSS, and the fact that AO is faster than Vue's (admittedly excellent) IBL I could see some real benefit to rendering in P6." This is absolutely true. For example, I also own 3dsmax with Vray rendering engine (one of the fastest true GI renderers on the market). However, in some animation tests I've run just recently, using IBL and AO (with optimized settings) in P6 rendered in almost half the time that Vray did, using pre-calculated true HDRI/GI. Also, there was minimal to no noticable flicker with the P6 animation, but the Vray animation had noticable flicker, which would have required higher settings and even longer render times. The output of the Vray was admittedly slightly better (despite the flicker) due mostly to the use of actual high dynamic range images, but the difference was minimal and could be adjusted in Combustion or AfterEffects with ease. Overall, rendertime was far more favorable for P6. BTW, this was a test of the same exact PZ3 animation, one hosted in Max via Bodystudio plugin, and one in P6, on the same machine, using comparable materials. Max still has it's benefits over Poser 6, of course: like a much more flexible G-buffer output, but I'm definitely impressed with P6, and will use it much more often for animation now.

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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.