the3Dwizard: Tried BOTH shadow map options - no difference as there are few CAST shadows in this fairly flat section of the model - shadow mapping should not affect textures anyway, but I tried it just to see. Nosfiratu: tried shading rate as low as 0.05 (one tenth the setting for "production) and as high as 4 (the default for "draft") - very minor difference (see my above example - the "draft" shading rate is 4 while the "production" shading rate is .5 - and you can see very little difference. Lowering the shading rate belos .5 made no difference. Neither did increasing the pixel samples. Tirjasdyn: Perhaps glasses AND a new monitor are in order. ;-) - look in particular at the shirt textures and compare the renders to the original sample. To ALL: thanks for comments - would love to see any actual renders you may have. Also I made another test to see if adding a BUMP map helped, but in the case of the Firefly it actually made things worse. why not try some side-by-side tests yourself and lets see if this is universal or isolated.