Particles are useful to stills renderers as it allows for unique material flows of water, smoke etc without postwork. A single frame, postwork is fine, but for a sequence of images it is much more immersive (no pun intended) if the water, smoke, mud, lava, whatever... has moved between frames in a manner that is believable.

I looked at IRAY with DAZ4.8... not free. The renderer is, but you buy all the texture stuff separately... ever added up all the 'add ons' that DAZ have available? Comes to 100's of dollars. Not free.

Oh, BTW, I use an AMD video card. IRAY is no advantage to me over Luxrender. Which IS free.

I have DAZ 4.7, but never use it because the library is retarded. I can never find anything, and have to constantly refresh the metatdata. I accept it is just a lack of familiarity, but why spend the hours on something that only replicates what I already have?

I'd be very happy if Poser had instancing so I could do proper outdoor scenes like I can do in Carrara. I'd also be happy if DAZ did some work on Carrara. Poser and Carrara are perfectly fine for me, and I would like to see it continue in development.