Quote - ahhh... thankyou ssgbryan. that answers my question although in a smith micro e-mail they state:-
"64-bit FireFly Render Engine fully utilizes your system for faster rendering and overall performance"
perhaps they should drop the faster bit

 
No, it is faster. On a 32-bit system, the largest amount of virtual memory that you can access for a single process is 2GB. On large scenes Poser 8 will work by loading in texture maps when it needs them, and dropping them when it doesn't, so there will be a lot more disk I/O. The 64-bit system won't spend nearly as much time on a large scene.

If you want to benchmark it, take a fairly large scene and render it in Poser Pro 2010. Keep adding elements (especially textures) to the scene until it uses 4 or 5 GB (or more) memory during rendering. (Windows task manager gives you a display of how much memory is used.) Time how long it takes to render. Now try rendering the same scene in Poser 8. There should be a marked difference.