well, quality will depend on what you need. Hardware is still not at par with software rendering but it will eventually get there and will probably be the choice for most people. you can currently get some very great renders from hardware. I will post side by side renders of software and hardware. hardware currently supports the following. Polygons and NURBS geometry Multiple textured channels Advanced transparency Hardware particles Instancing Point, Directional, Spot, and Ambient Light types Any number of lights Light linking Per-vertex and per-pixel shading effects Multi-pass and multi-sampling anti-aliasing File textures for any supported channel On-the-fly procedural and shading network conversions Specular highlights Bumps Reflections Shadows Motion blur RBG color, alpha matte (mask), and Z depth output Command line rendering Render diagnostics. Warnings for unsupported primitives, shaders, and light types and light features are provided.