This is, what the Poser Pro 2010 readme says. It probably applies to all versions of Poser with OpenGL:

Poser Pro 2010 offers OpenGL hardware accelerated rendering as well as SreeD software rendering options for the scene preview display.

In most cases, hardware rendered previews will be faster than software rendered previews. Additionally, hardware accelerated performance is independent of the preview window size, whereas software rendering will yield a lower frame rate with larger preview window sizes.

Unfortunately, due to the vast variety of graphics hardware available, hardware acceleration may not be supported on every system. In that case please use the SreeD software rendering option. Poser should automatically detect whether or not OpenGL hardware rendering is supported for your system, and if not, should default to SreeD software rendering.

Poser Pro 2010 supports Hardware shading, allowing you to preview procedural shaders created in the Material room on high performance graphics hardware without performing a final render. This is an extremely demanding task for your graphics hardware. If your graphics board does not offer at least 256 ALU instructions for shaders Poser's hardware check will determine that it is not supported. Some shader effects are not supported in preview at this point. This includes raytraced effects such as Ambient Occlusion, Reflection and Refraction as well as Bump and Displacement Maps. In case a shader contains unsupported nodes or is too complex for your graphics hardware the resulting preview might be all white.

Poser Pro 2010 allows you to configure preview texture size. The maximum size depends on your graphics hardware. Please understand that if your scene contains numerous high resolution textures you might reach the limits of available memory. If you experience failure to load textures please consider reducing preview texture size.

Please note:

• If transparent objects are not displayed correctly or appear inverted, please enable ‘Enhance multi-layer transparency’ in rendering preview settings. This might adversely affect preview frame rate.

• It is strongly recommended that users visit the website of their graphics accelerator vendor and update to the latest driver version.

• 'Optimize simple materials' is active by default and recommended to ease the impact of Hardware shading on your graphics hardware. If you encounter OpenGL preview problems with Hardware Shading enabled and 'Optimize simple materials' disabled, please activate this option.

• ATI FireGL users should select the "Poser" profile for optimal performance.

• If your graphics hardware does not support the creation of a pbuffer for offscreen drawing properly, you might encounter artifacts when rendering preview movies with OpenGL. If this is the case, please do not cover the document window in Poser while exporting a movie.

• Enabling triple buffering or threaded optimization might result in redraw issues.