> Quote - the advantage to ray-traced shadows is that they're realistic.  the advantage to depth-map is that they are faster to calculate in some cases, hence they're physically wrong, as seen in poser 4.  ....

Yep, this can best be seen when using displacement or polygon smoothing (here on a cube), which makes the object appear smoother. But of course the cube is not really made smooth (the cube does not actually change shape), it is rather an illusion by the renderer. As it can be seen, the naive depth map shadows erroneously use the smoothed object for shadows (left), while the raytrace shadows do not fall for such cheap tricks, and correctly use the blocky, "real" cube, hence more realistic (right).

:-)