Quote - The cunning route Snarly has now so kindly opened for us of course permits to work like DS does: subdivide only just before you render.  If the script is appended with  commands to kick start the renderer and upon completion delete the subdivided mesh and turn the figure visible again, you would have the transparant one-click solution.  

Strictly, DS applies a low level (once or twice usually) to the viewport, but the real SubD is applied at rendertime by 3Delight (like Poser's polygon smoothing in Firefly, as far as I know) - how far that rendertime SubD goes depends on the render settings. But as you say, SubDing the final shape as late as possible does reduce the system load - though presumably this is, for now, practical for still-images only.