i've heard a lot of debates about poser 7, and while i'm interested in several features (the new morph tool and the animation palette layers, for instance), the big issue i want to know about is rendering and out of memory errors.  right now i'm fighting poser to render what is a pretty simple scene with 3 figures (one is a robot, and i'm not using any textures on it, and the third is a unimesh figure with no textures or morphs).  and i'm completely fed up.  as much as i've had daz | studio crash about as frequently, as much as i've already paid most of the price i paid for the poser 6 upgrade in d|s plugins (and i don't have that many), and as much as i love what the material room can do, i'm just about ready to give up on poser all together.  i've got all my settings so low as to be almost useless, and it's just barely rendering.

is poser 7 any better?

and why oh why is this so much easier in d|s?  i actually don't find d|s faster, but it will do two things poser simply won't for me: render true sss and render anything even vaguely taxing.  d|s will take hours on a render if it needs to.  everytime i have poser try to do anything taxing enough that it would take hours, it dies.   is it because (for no apparent reason) poser has no render to disk and has to put the whole image in memory?  i've had no problem rendering up to 4800 px in d|s, where poser seems to choke the moment i go above 1000 pixels.

when will this become top priority?  i appreciate greatly all the hard work that went into poser 7.  i know the community asked for everything and the kitchen sink, and perfect figures on top of that, and that the developers did their absolute best to supply that before the end of this year.   but if they had implemented absolutely no new features whatsoever and just made firefly able to handle print resolution renders with several clothed and coiffed figures in a scene, i for one would have been absolutely ecstatic.

or did they already do that?  can anyone say how far the rendering abilities have been improved?

oh, and for the record, i presently have 3 gigs of ram and an athlon 64 dual core 4200+.  not the top, but it should be enough to get the job done.  and is enough in other programs.