The test scene was composed on Poser 7, and consists of 1 V3 model and clothes, background figure, and three colored lights. The testbed was my laptop: AMD Turion 64 MT-40 (2.2 Ghz, 1MB L2 Cache), 2 GB DDR 400 Ram, 100GB 7200 ATA HDD, ATI Radeon X1600 256 MB video.

Results:
Poser 7 Firefly - "Final" setting - all options expect no Raytracing and min shade rate set to .2

Render time: 2:49 seconds. (about 45 seconds of that was asset load)

Poser 7 "P4" engine - all options checked except for "Ignore shade trees"

Render time: 1:37 seconds

Poser 6 Firefly - "Final" setting - texture filtering, no raytracing, min shade rate .2

Render time: 3:37

I'm not sure if the "final" settings are apples to apples feature wise in Firefly between P6 and P7 - I'm under the impression that P7 always uses texture filtering so I left it checked on. P7 was notably faster rendering then P6, and personally, I find the results better (notice that the model's skin isn't so red from the colored lights, and seems to have a bit better detail).

Next, I'll try it on my Athlon 64 x2 4600 running Windows x64 for those that are interested.

(note the attached file is a compressed JPG to get it to fit here, so there is going to be a little loss of detail)

I find that odd texture-shifting on the clothing very troubling.

i'm  running p7 on a 64x2 4800, 64 bit windows pro, 4 gigs of memory and it is using all
of the cpu power and blazing thru renders that were much slower in p-6.  i really appreciate what a smooth transition this upgrade is...yesterday i was working on renders in p6, today i am faster using p-7.  and of course it looks like there's a lot more to learn and that's the fun part...

my eyes must really such because I can't see much of a difference that's signifcant between any of them

Quote - my eyes must really such because I can't see much of a difference that's signifcant between any of them

Perhaps this will help ....

I think texture filtering operates on a per-2d image map node basis now (look at the options in the material room 2d image map node).

i too think it is the texture filtering.

P7 has texture filtering assigned to the material by default when you bring something in, however, it sets the texture filtering to "Quality" (as opposed to "none" or "fast")

P6 only has the one texture filtering option (on or off). also note that when you used texture filtering in p6 with a DAZ figure and typical DAZ skin texture you get white lines along the seams because the texture is shifted/sampled beyond they typical area. So i would think that it is P6 that has the shifted texture, and P7 has corrected this.

From what I've read here about P7, there's not enough difference to P6 to make me change.
Even the increase in render speed is minimal.
And the bugs persist just like earlier versions.
P4pp to P5, that was good, and worth the upgrade.
P6 to P7 is just fiddling around the edges.
Think I'll wait for P8. (yes it rhymes).