Right.

Here is a summary of what I think are the most important key features with regard to rendering. There are many other things, like morph tool improvements, UI improvements, wxPython, but those don't affect your ability to produce better renders - they just change your workflow.

Poser Pro (today) is Poser 7 plus

• Gamma correction built into the renderer
• Network rendering (using multiple computers you own to share the load)
• 64-bit rendering (to be able to render much more content in one scene)
• More ways to import/export data for other applications and renderers.
• Output can be HDRI (to produce images to be postworked with more sophistication or to produce image content to be used in subsequent renders)

Poser 8 is Poser 7 plus

• IDL (for realistic secondary lighting)
• Light falloff (for realistic primary lighting)
• Soft ray-traced shadows with sampling control (for realistic shadows)
• Vastly improved hair rendering (real hair, not trans-mapped)
• Tone mapping (sort of does what Photoshop Levels does and allows squishing HDR data into an LDR image)
• More efficient use of multi-core CPUs

 

Poser Pro 2010 is all of that combined, plus other new stuff I can't talk about.
 

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Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)