Bryce: As far as I can see, DAZ is dropping Bryce in favor of Carrara. I've tried Carrara 5 Pro, and it can do everything Bryce can do, but better. It also imports Poser dynamic hair and renders it pretty well.
From a commercial standpoint, DS/Carrara is more interesting for DAZ than DS/Bryce.

While Poser 7/Vue 6 Infinite is definitely a more powerful combination than DS/Carrara, it is also significantly more expensive. Both combination give good value for money though.

As for DS stability and ease of use, I've got several machines that far exceed DS requirements, the lightest of the machines being an Athlon64x2 4400+ with an nVidia 7900GS graphics card (the other two machines are Intel Q6600 with nVidia 7800GTX /nVidia 8800GT graphics cards). I run XP Pro 32 bit, XP Pro 64 bit and Vista 64 bit on those machines, multiboot.
In NONE of these configuration DS 2.0 was able to recognize and link to my Poser libraries. No compression used, no external morph targets used, .OBJ files relocated to the Geometries subfolder, and still DS doesn't get it.

Funny thing is, DS can load Poser scenes on my systems. Okay, I have to tell DS where each and every .OBJ and texture file is located, but once that is done, the scene looks OK. Animation also imports OK.
The posing system in DS works counterintuitive and clunky on my systems. But the COLLADA export works very well, and is far more functional than the COLLADA beta exporter for Poser 7.

So that is the only use I have for DS: exporting Poser scenes to COLLADA.

The pen is mightier than the sword. But if you literally want to have some impact, use a typewriter

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