So, I know I just came back to the world of Poser and just started the world of DAZ Studio, and that fact will likely make a lot of people not take my opinion on any of this seriously. That's fine, but here it is anyway.

No Poser/DAZ figure has ever looked real. It's not that they can't do it, mind you. You can get a lot of realism out of 10k polys in a real-time rendering engine like Unreal 4, so they could clearly do it with offline rendering, and especially offline PBR rendering like Cycles or something. They just don't want to, because realism is not what people buy. They buy a sort of stylized or idealized pretty.

Just look at the picture of Scarlett Johansson posted in this thread next to a picture of any Poser or DAZ figure from the same angle with similar lighting, and you will see what I mean. Scarlett, as beautiful as she is, will look haggard next to the render, precisely because minute facial detail (which could have been included with normal or displacement maps) was intentionally omitted. Better still, look at any of the celebrity look-alike models out there on the web next to their real life counterparts, and you'll see just how not-real the renders look. The little details are omitted because they tend to age the face, particularly on women. It's a truth that has been taught to portrait artists since the beginning of the genre.

When people say they want their figures to be realistic, 9 out of 10 times what they mean is that they want them to be believable. They want them to have a likeness of the person they represent if they are doing a portrait type piece, not a 1:1 recreation. They want plausibility, because as we all know, all art is abstraction to some degree, even in 3d.

I'm not saying it can't be very good. Just look at the CG Arnold in Terminator Genisys. That's bloody close to looking real (though in truth the hair especially leaves something to be desired). The figures, hair, clothes, etc. that we have to work with is nowhere near that level. It's not even on the level of the Neo vs. Agent Smith fight scene in The Matrix Reloaded. It's closer to the CG Superman that catches the airliner by the nose in Superman Returns, and you'll notice how far that particular effect was kept from the camera.

I love Poser and the DAZ figures, but they are not realistic.