I am just curious as to the average hardware power of Bryce 5 users. As for myself, I use my Bryce 5 on 1.8 GHz with 256 MB RAM. I also have a 64 MB ATI Radeon video card. I also would to know what softwares out there that takes advantage of video card in final rendering, i.e. makes the rendering process much much more faster.

My computer has a 1.733GHz AMD Athlon XP processor with 1 gig of RAM. I don't think that the vid card is a contributing factor in the render time of a Bryce image. However I have a GeForce3 Ti 200 video card. Not the best but does for me what I need it to do. 8) ~ Swade ~

RAM memory is the influencing factor then? Will someone please confirm? If memmory is the influencing speed factor, then all I have to do is to upgrade my PC's RAM. :-) At first, I was thinking of switching over to Vue D'Espirit 4 since on their website, a 3D hardware support is listed along with the "40% more faster rendering engine."

Got a 2.0 Ghz Celeron w/ 256 Meg RAM here. No video card, tho'. Sorry, Digital. RAM only influences how much cra...er...stuff (hehe) you can put into the scene. How many polygons your PC can push around. As far as we know, the processor is the only factor when it comes to rendering speed. If your going to upgrade for faster renders, it'll have to be the processor. If you want your renders to go a little faster, try "Render to disk". It always goes quicker. Bryce doesn't have to update the interface as it renders. HTH, Mike

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=1270944

Two athlon 2000+xp / 512 meg ddr400 machines for rendering with 'bryce lightning'. I work mainly on my desktop that has a radeon 9600 pro, 256 meg version. The other has a radeon 9000. Running windows xp.

Thank you for your replies!!! :-) Helps me a lot! I've read the postings linked with the messages. Thanks everybody!

Best suggestion I can give is go with a NT based windows OS xp/nt.. Honestly, no matter what I did, I could not surpass 5,000 metaballs on 98, now I am pusing 15,000 and haven't crashed.

yeah, ornlu, but you also have two processors, which makes a huge difference for bryce.

No its two computers, I use them to server render, but I only work on one. which has a single 2000+xp.

Ornlu, two processors? Do you have a custom built PC? I have a Dell Dimensions 8200 with Windows XP. I don't know if I'll be able to have dual processors.

I'm on an amd 2.1 athelon with 1g ddr ram and ati 8500dvd allinwonder vid card. Two HD's, win2k sp4, asus a7m266 board. I was on a 1.4 chip with half gig ram on the same other components back when I got B5 and happy there. The major reason for the chip/ram upgrade was poser 5.

Just setup a xp 2000 512 ddr ram and a 1.2 tbird w/1.5gig ram 5 min ago wahooo on a 100mbs network now to hook the other 4 pc's to it hehehehe

Draculaz, the only way two-processor machine would influence Bryce would be to be able to run Bryce and Lighting on the same machine. Unfortunately, Bryce is not Max.

AMD Athlon XP 2200, 512 megs of RAM, 800 MHz iMac G3, 400 MHz PowerBook G3... (The last 2 were macs, in case you didn't guess) The funny thing is, I havn't even tried to configure Bryce Lighting... Note the empty gallery.

AMD Athlon XP 1800+ 512 Mb SDRAM 64 Mb Nvidia GeForce4 MX 440 Windows 200 Pro SP4 Your CPU equals render speed, period. Your RAM dictates how big of a scene you can open, save, import, export, etc. (with ease and no OS freezing) Your Video Card dictates how many polygons you can push around your screen with ease. "Render to disk" might speed up your rendering somewhat, since then your cpu/video card don't have to worry about updating the scene being rendered on your screen. Bryce cannot take advantage of video cards that help rendering speeds. Only higher-end prog's like Maya, 3DSMax, etc, can do that. AgentSmith

2.4 GHz Pentium 4 with 512 MB RAM Windows XP Home

wow i'm impresssed at all this hardware, makes me go all gooosepimply, oh hang on need to go and whip the hamster a bit more, hmm wonder if i can go to dual processor by adding another wheel....

P3 450 with 320 RAM and win98se. Far below the average, or even desirable, amount of pc grunt for this stuff.

Flak, Don't worry, I used to run a Pentium 150 with 64 Meg RAM for this stuff. Good things can still be done!

Wrong, digitalphotography, the determining factor is your Processor, for the most part. I run P3 800, 192mb Ram and windows ME. I still do it, somehow...

I run WinXP HE with a 2400+ Athlon XP and 2.6 gig RAM DDR, a necessity for all the polygons I "shuffle around". IE behaves somewhat funny, though. - Zoot

2.6 gig? =P good game, But out of curiosity, what configuration do you have to get 2.6? Most I can get on my Asus NForce 2 delux board is 3 gigs, but this is with 3 sticks of 1024 meg ram, now, to get 2.5 you could have 2 1024's and a 512, but how did you get 2.6?

Is rj001 whipping his hamster again? I hate when he does that. I got a P4 2.5, 512 Rambus, Asus board.

P4 2.4 laptop with 512mb,ATI mobile card and a P4 2.4,512mb tower with 64mb ATI Radeon. Both machines use XP home ver.

Well, I have three machines I use for Bryce, 1. a dual 2.2 Ghz Xeon with 1Gb or RamBus memory and a an ATI workstation videocard with 128Mb's of DDR. 2. a 2.4 Ghz P4 with 1Gb of DDR memory with an ATI videocard with 128 Mb's of DDR, 3. a dual P3 1.2 Ghz with 768 Mb's of PC133 RAM and a GeForce 3 with 64 Mb's of memory on it. All machines are running Win 2000 Pro.

Ornlu...ok, then. 2.560 GB, I rounded it up to 2.6 for simplicity. I have a K7 Triton400 motherboard which says it can manage 3 pieces of 1024 MB modules but as a matter of fact the machine won't even start with them all applied. So I had to reduce the RAM to 2.56 GB to make it work. I had some Bryce 5 files which took 14 minutes to open or save with 1.25 GB RAM, but with the 2.56 GB we're talking about 5 - 6 minutes for the same files. Strange things happen to IE, though - it hangs up from time to time. My second OS, WinME, won't start at all with this amount of RAM. - Zoot

MY computer? well its dead now... maybe i'll be force to upgrade it or better yet nuy a new one.. anyway.. it wasn't much anyway... it had a Intel celeron 800 processor on an asus motherboard with 256 ddr ram and all built it 32mb vid card and sound card... bot much to it but it did me a lot of good... im happy using a poor mans computer (which is now dead by the way... oh i mentioned that earlier)... sniff

I must clarify...I'm also using a system besides this one (my AMD system)...it's a P3 1 GHz with 256 of PC133 SDRAM...it seems to do really well with rendering. I often run it under Windows 2003 Enterprise Edition when I render because it seems to do a quicker job than in XP...maybe that's just because it's a fresher install, not sure. But the specs on that computer are rather basic. I'd like to try Bryce Lightning sometime again though...you can use that for stills? I'm not in that animation realm just yet. MD

1 ghz processor, 512 ram. I'd like to get a 2 ghz processor soon.

I have an AMD AthlonXP 1900+ with 1.12G DDR2100 and a GeForce2 with 32M RAM and an AMD Athlon 600 with 512M PC133 and a 4M no name video card. Never tried Bryce lightening though...

i use an 800mHz pentium II with 256M RAM

3.06 GHz Intel Pentium IV with 1 GB of RAM and a GeForce4 TI 4200

A mac G4 533 mhz with 640 mb ram.

AMD Athlon XP 1800+ with 512 RAM, ATI Radeon DontKnowWhichOne 128 MB, Windows XP Home. I still haven't felt the need to buy more RAM (I'm able to listen loud music and writing while it's rendering, so for me is OK), but my biggest Bryce scenefile is about 300megs, so... S.

My largest has been around 150 MB...after that, instability city. I'm trying to get better about reducing polys to hopefully streamline my files more...who knows. MD

Im running an AMP Athlon XP 2.0, 512 RAM, GeForce4, XP Pro Stash ;0)