Hi,
To answer this question, I would like to ask you which version of InDesign are you using? Till InDesign CC and earlier, we did not use to respect group items positioning and hence items even if grouped used to appear one after the other. With InDesign 9.2, group items maintain their relative position and hence there is no need to rasterize group anymore to preserve group appearance. But relative width is not honored for items if they are part of group. For example, if an image and caption are grouped together and image is set “Relative to Text flow” from Object export options, then also the image will be converted to fixed size in pixels since it is no possible to maintain group positioning with relative settings.
If you have a workflow wherein you have a caption appearing right after the image, then you can avoid creating group and set image “Relative to text flow” if you wish your images to occupy entire available width of the reader.
Regards,
Pooja
InDesign Engineering