Well, I would tend to agree with you on all points, dr_bernie, but I'm afraid that's what may be coming.  Hopefully they could incorporate some of the other things you suggest, but Daz is kinda famous for propeganda advertising, and what better propeganda for Carrara (their point of view) than a feature that they can advertise as "ground breaking" technology?  It's kinda not, but they could say it, and people would buy it.

Embree is undoubtedly great, but the implimentation of it in Cinema, for example, is not entirely without some issues. When it's used with certain Irradiance Caching methods (particularly the new method introduced in C4Dr15), it increases memory consumption by up to 4x the standard on a typical scene, causing some users to run out of resources fast.  The solution, according to Maxon, is to use the "old" IR engine for now.  The speed increase is still worth it, but from a programming standpoint, I wonder if Embree presents some issues that smaller companies like Daz, who are really just content developers, not dedicated software engineers, might find problematic?  I'm merely speculating here of course, and it does kind of back up what you are suggesting about the mipmaps.

It just seems strangely coincidental that Daz is also introducing this HD morph technology at the same time, and we know that mipmaps are used in sculpting apps for alpha brushes, which would be useful in creating high resolution morphs.

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Tools :  3dsmax 2015, Daz Studio 4.6, PoserPro 2012, Blender v2.74

System: Pentium QuadCore i7, under Win 8, GeForce GTX 780 / 2GB GPU.