a question i've got for all of those 'high quality renderer' users...

why use it in the first place?

if you want to get an idea of how your scene ACTUALLY looks, why not just do a software render with the default light? iit may take more time, but it gives you a much more accurate render, and if there's something you want to tweak you can always either re-render a selection from the current render, or you can set up an IPR and change your settings to see the results in near realtime...

i guess since i have a (much) slower video card (64MB quadro2 pro) i don't use this feature - i must be missing out, but after watching a few GI and caustics tuts from autodesk's new alias website (www.the-area.com), i find that sure, high-quality rendering mode seems essential at first, but i also find that the computers used to create such tuts are also wicked fast... which to me says that high-quality rendering is somewhat useless... unless your video card TOTALLY exceeds the requirements that your computer does... which would mean you rely more upon what your video card shows you in a viewport than in what a 'render into new window' shows you, which is much more accurate.

therefore in a very humble recommendation, i'd say get more ram (which is relatively cheap nowadays compared to decent video cards) and render your image out the right way. it won't lie to you unless you did something wrong.

does anyone agree?