It must be something though, when I try a render with standard and then down sized textures in Poser 7 the speed difference is dramatic. I also avoid stalled renders. Could it be something about the amount the textures must be  resampled for those individual tiles? How much map area must be sampled to how much render area? I would think that sampling say 500x500 area of texture down to a 10x10 area on the render would take more time if not memory than sampling a 50x50 area of map to a 10x10 area of render?