Poser 7 runs slower for two reasons:

1. multiple undos.. it has to stare every change you make, and there a slight hesitation there, especially for big changes. Turn it off if you like, and and it'll speed back up, but you'll of course loose one of the most requested poser features over the last several years.

2. Opengl Advanced lighting, proceedural texture, and transparency previews. Poser is now calculating the new light types, your proceedurals textures, and transparency mapping  for preview display in opengl. Slows opengl down for sure.. BUT opengl looks good enough in a lot of cases where you really don't even need to render for some animations! So instead of rendering and waiting hours for a 60 frame animation, it's almost instantanious, and saves out in a minute or so!

Pretty dang amazing, if you ask me, and again, one of the BIG requested features over the last few years.

I went back to p5 to test something, and thought something was broken, because of the preview display, and it just turned out I was so used to all the new stuff, I forgot how primitive the older versions looked.

And on a fast machine, with a recent video card, preview is still pretty fast.. and multiple preview display types are avasilable for those big multiple figure scenes.

You want new features, there has to be SOME cost somwhere in execution speed. Heck, look at Lightwave's modeler preview.. a $900 program, and one millenium figure mesh.. add textures and transmaps, and watch it slow down more then P7.. and look no where NEAR as nice! And that's in a "pro" MUCH more expensive program.

As I said before, consumers wasnd it ALL, want it NOW, and want it FREE, and want to run it on outdated systems.. how many times have we heard of people with problems still running win 98, or poser 4?

You want more functionality, it's gonna cost more money, and require faster hardware, plain and simple.

Way too many people take way too many things way too seriously.