Torquinox posted at 7:46 AM Fri, 18 April 2025 - #4495044

From my perspective, if Daz future looks grim, it's because they seem unable to keep their software properties up to date. Maybe Hexagon and Carrara are unnecessary because of Blender. Yet, both do have good qualities and their might have been value in keeping them current. But DS has a bigger problem because of its tight reliance on IRAY and associated dependency on NVIDIA for their big render solution. 

I find IRAY renders often look pretty good without a lot of effort. That's a plus! But there is an issue with a bugged version of IRAY and the fact that we're waiting on the next big release of DS (DS2025, apparently) to get support for the 50x0 cards. Combine this with a relative shortage of 40x0 cards, high price of cards, etc, and it's a problem for the Daz community.

I like to use filament for putting scenes together because of its speed and that it also looks pretty good. I'd like to just use Filament to render because I hate waiting for renders, but the DS Filament implementation is a tiny fraction of what the actual Filament renderer can do. So, that also sucks. 3DL is a leftover in DS - The whole language changed in later versions of the renderer and Daz proved disinterested, unwilling, or perhaps unable to keep 3DL up to date in DS - Not worth the effort, maybe. Blender dispensed with their biased Blender renderer a long time ago, though you can still download an older version of Blender if you really care to use it.

The reliance on NVIDIA tech means the whole Mac market is stuck rendering on CPU - The whole Metal thing is a problem for which Daz has no solution. SImilarly, the AMD GPU people are left in the cold. It is true that AMD graphics cards represent only a tiny fraction of the GPU market, but still... AMD GPUs are useless for IRAY. So where does that leave DS and the Daz market? Even Richard Haseltine admits he's in a bind with respect to his old hardware and the fact that there is no current DS-compatible upgrade path (50x0 cards). I guess we all get to use DS as an export mechanism to Unreal or Blender. Yet that certainly ramps up the technical requirements for using the program. And I'll just admit it: I like using DS to render DS-compatible and old Poser content. It's a wonderful box of toys! I'm just not sure what's going to happen with it in the future.

Ok. I'm done.

Oh exactly.  That is another HUGE reason.  Like I said this earlier: where is all the money going?  Cause it clearly is not going back into improving the software.

You don't put money back in to optimizing your software and making sure it runs well, you start having people asking questions on what the F is going on...