I was wondering about that myself. A friend suggested those settings. In general, compared to what I was using, I would say it slightly improved the look of my renders.

I don't have Poser at work or I'd send you the settings I used to use up until about 2 weeks ago. Nothing surprising or revolionary, I just didn't use the D3D plug-in before and set some pretty standard settings in the regular render settings window.

Something else I noticed, these scenes rendered very quickly compared to some of the stuff I'm working on right now. Is that possibly related to the number of lights in the scene, or just to the number of objects?