Actually I tend to regard the "lowest common denominator" issue as an ethnocentric one (US-UK) for almost as long as there has been computer generated 3D stuff in games, the Brits have historically lacked access to hardware acceleration, (starting with cheap Sinclair computers.) So they built tight code instead, which benefited them when hardware got better. The Americans by contrast, always had access to better hardware, so they used that, which lead to the great progammer exodus of the 80's, as it became cheaper to write better code than build new hardware. This worried the UK government so much they refused to let you go if you got a "free" university education from the state. Europe yes, America no. I had a mate that took an embalming course to get around it :) "Wing Commander 3" famously had two reviews in the UK at time of release. it got 90% if you had a "cutting egde" P133 and 64Mb of memory, but only 60% if you had a more normal '486 DX4 and 32Mb. These days, while the processor continues to creep forward, the GFX cards are bounding ahead. The chip on the ATI Radeon 9700 is twice the size of the latest AMD processor and requires a seperate power source as the AGP slot doesn't supply enough juice :) Even hardware constrained games consoles, long the preserve of the tight loop, are powered by the latest GFX hardware, my cube has a "Powered by ATI" sticker on the front, and rival Nvidia powers my Xbox. But Poser? It has remained stubbornly single threaded and memory intensive, using a GFX card soley as a display device through the OS. Some people here have actually made poser faster by turning hardware GFX acceration off! Yes folks, our beloved software is an anachronism! :) later jb