A bit more official news on Poser 12 has been released.
* Poser 12’s SuperFly render-engine has had its Cycles render engine updated from Poser 11, to a more recent (unspecified) version of Blender’s Cycles. It’s still called SuperFly.
* Several new GPU rendering options have been added to SuperFly, and it will now support the NVIDIA OptiX Ray Tracing Engine (for which you’ll need a suitable NVIDIA graphics card and a PC capable of running it — the entry-point graphics-card averages about £350 here in the UK). Some forum trolls will no doubt jump on this and use it to insinuate that users are being ‘forced’ to make expensive upgrades. That’s not the case, as SuperFly users can easily switch it over to use normal graphics-cards (NVIDIA or AMD) or to CPU-only rendering, like you can with DAZ’s equivalent iRay renderer.1.
* Improved image quality via SuperFly integrating Cycles’s new “shadow catching and background transparency” features (with or without OptiX Ray Tracing, it seems). Plus “adaptive sampling” (i.e. it automatically detects ‘noisy’ areas of the picture, such as shadows-in-haze, and does a bit more rendering in those bits — so they’re less noisy on the final render).
* And there’s a firm release date for Poser 12 on Windows (Early Access version): Monday 2nd November 2020. At which point we’ll presumably get the full itemised feature-list and (hopefully) a complete detailed technical changelog.
1. There is a misleading claim made in the linked page, that DAZ iRay “only functions with NVIDIA hardware.” Not true, though NVIDIA do their very best to make you think that. I can run it quite happily on an AMD PC via CPU, or on a CPU-only Xeon workstation. The latter is fast enough, running only on the CPUs, to even give me a real-time main viewport of reasonable size and responsiveness.