Quote - Indeed, and P7 SR3 seems to take forever to load the textures used... obviously the greater the size and number of texture files, the longer it's going to take. However, using the same scene and figures for a second render is much faster as it only has to 'load' the textures once.

The first "loading textures" stage is creating the temporary files for the texture cache. Since common file formats like JPG or PNG are not optimal for a tiled texture cache, Poser converts the textures to tiled OpenEXR files with downsampled MIP representations (you can find those files in Poser's temp folder). Any following renders then use the converted copies from the first pass and therefore the "loading textures" stage then only verifies their file dates to make sure to keep them up to date.