wolf359 posted at 5:08PM Sun, 21 July 2019 - #4357656

I get it... GPU rendering is the undeniable future.

Still,.. Forcing people to buy hardware from one manufacturer (NVIDIA) because they have committed to a Brute force path tracer ( IRay), and allowing PA's to sell products with several dozen 4K textures on the BOTTOM's of vehicle models, is the reason why people now think it is not possible to use a laptop for Daz studio.

I do agree - one of the reasons why I'm typing this on an Acer and not a shiny new MacBook Pro is because Apple doesn't do nVidia GPUs. I think it's dumb to have to base one's hardware purchases on software/hardware exclusivity. I get why they went to iRay - it's a fairly decent engine that doesn't cost a whole lot to license.

OTOH, DS still has 3Delight which works just fine - it's not an either-or situation. I trust that Poser is similar, in that they have a higher-end and a middle-range (or lower-range?) render engine selection, yes?

Also, the hyper-rez texture set has been a thing for, like, forever now - not confined to DAZ, Poser, Rendo...

But, it takes no time at all to gank-down the rez by half or more if you need to. I do that as part of basic prep for items that tend to stay towards the background. There's even products that will do that in-app if you're that lazy (on the DS front - not sure about Poser, but it would be fairly easy to 'gin up). This subject is where you and I disagree a bit, since I'd much rather have high-rez that I can make lo-rez, than to try to upsize a lo-rez texture for close-ups (99% of the attempts wind up looking like utter crap, yanno?) Again, this doesn't matter what app or render engine we're talking about... this is general principle.

Back on-topic, figures need to mind this, perhaps - a great default figure feature would be to provide two texture options for the base figure - lo/hi rez? It's cheap to do, and doesn;t bloat things by too much. Only the newbies would really appreciate it, I know, but it'd be a nice gesture.