Quote - While you all have good points, I am in the Dale camp....I think it might NOT be FireFly. 

Who owns/develops FF? Making it 64-bit, render in background and netrender savvy...these are substantial upscale shifts. Is E-F responsible and capable of a substantial revamp of the external and/or owned-by-someone-else FireFly? Dale, how do you know these features have already existed and are just now being 'turned on?'

And they may be saving the 'brand' of the render engine for a PR bomb, indeed, like Dale said. In other words pjz, yes they are going to make significant hay out of it, but the mower has not entered the field yet. Further evidence: if it is FF, why are they saying "a" 64-bit renderer, not touting "a completely transformed FireFly making it a world-class engine" or something like that. I don't think the true puffery has begun, yet.

On the other had, the bit about switching from REYES (render everything you see, right?) to raytrace...that sounds ominous. Yet...what is the explanation of the current ability of FF to render raytrace and the existence of a nascent GI stub? 

I don't -know-, as in have facts. Those were based on the behavior that has been observed since eF took over Poser development (and just before, actually). There were shader nodes in P5 that didn't get enabled properly until P6. P6 apparently had the basics of the animation layer, which wasn't switched on until P7. P7 is the first version to have a decoupled, stand alone render option; and here comes P7Pro, which has a standalone renderer and network rendering....which would require a decoupled renderer if you intended to do anything else while rendering on the network. This seems to be eF's modus apperandi; place new tech in a release in an inactive or disabled state, see if the users's systems accept the stubs, take any wierd bug reports and check to see if the new tech is responsible, then switch the 'new' feature on in the next release. Using that as my basis for conjecture, then the questions they ask about features could very easily be indicators of what is to come. I'm also keeping in mind that eF has a good working relationship with eon.....who has apparently been getting some tech infusion from unnamed sources. And the FireFly renderer is already a bastard, being a REYES engine with raytracing functions. So if the basic raytracing architecture is there already, it should be expandable, true?