Y-Phil, I neither wanted to attack you nor single you out. I was just replying to FoulPet's comment, wanting to see somthing more realistic. Sorry!

There are many "poor" Firefly shaders around that either are nowhere realistic nor are optimized in any way. Many take eons to render without any visible benefit, so I spent a lot of time in the past creating my own.

So, yes, your test proves that Superfly can render a given shader faster than Firefly.

But was it a "good" Firefly shader in the first place? Was this shader optimized for speed in the first place, or was it just hundreds of nodes cobbled together with most of them not doing anything?

And most important: What do we want from Poser? What does the average Poser buyer want from Poser?

Truly photorealistic shaders, but no access to truly photorealistic figures and props?

Or might he or she be better of with less "Gee-Whiz" tech, but better figures and more realistic props instead?

Merchants and customers left because Vicky 5 didn't natively work in Poser anymore. (Ok, we had a few workarounds at first, but they were just that, workarounds)

And the replacements were all pretty poor, sorry to be so blunt.

And instead of using the little time and money available to supply us with better figures, the owners of Poser just sloppily implemented another shader engine!

As long as we don't have those figures, I see any other  new "Feature" (aside from bug-fixes), as a disservice to Poser.

When I bought my Poser 4 in 2000 (I still have the box), I did so not because of the render engine. I did it because Posette looked so great!

"Wow, I can have full control over such a great figure? And there's a whole family of them. And animals, too?

TAKE MY MONEY, Curios Labs!

And when I opened Poser 4 for the first time, I was hooked!"

*

When I opened Poser 11 for the first time and was greeted by L'Femme, I couldn't eradicate her fast enough from my runtime.

"BE GONE, FIEND! I rather render box primitives for the rest of my life than succumb to your abominable shape!"

Sorry, I know this hurts the feelings of some, but if any of those Vicky replacements we went through in the last decade (Yes, it's already 11 years now since Vicky's gone) were any good, why is still 99% of the merchadise sold here for G8?

Why did all the talented artists leave in droves? And took their customers with them?

Because Poser doesn't inspire them anymore, that's why.

And that is not because the render engine needed an upgrade.

It's like having a car with a broken engine. And instead of fixing the engine, you re-upholster the seats and give it a new paintjob.

And then you wonder why noone wants to buy your car.

*

Anyway, I will unsubscribe from this thread now.

We had this discussion since the day DAZ released V5, and I actually warned this community about that exactly this would happen the moment I noticed that Vicky 4 had some "Studio-only" features.

Maybe Poser 12 isn't abandonware, yet.

But to me, it sure feels like it already is.

IMHO