Is there a way to allocate more memory to Bryce once its loaded? So that Bryce renders quickter. Thanks for any help.

What OS (operating system)?

I use FreeRam XP pro. It's free. You can get it at download.com. I believe this works under both windows xp and windows 98. There are similar programs that let you set thread priority. Unfortunately bryce resets this to 'idle' every time it becomes unfocused IE you alt-tab to another window.

Umm Memory or "ram" only allows you to open a larger file, your processor is what makes it render fast, and Bryce is limited on that aspect, even a high end Open GL card won't make it render faster. Bryce is based off of pure raw processor speed.

Actually memory allocation does speed up the render process. With 512 megs of ram I rendered approximately 1/4-1/3 slower than I do now with 1024. IE if it took me 60 minutes before. It now takes 40-45 minutes. I think this mainly comes into play when rendering larger scenes as my memory was allready exhausted. Freeing up ram definitely increases render time. Especially if you have very little free.

In XP Pro if you open task manager/processes then right click on Bryce you can set the priority to high which puts everything else on the back burner while Bryce is rendering. Also once you've done this only minimize the task manager, if you close it you remove the high priority. HTH 8) Catlin

For win 2k can't you set up bryce to run on a virtual machine and high priority to that virtual machine that way, it'd be automatic when you click on the adjusted shortcut???

Ornlu wrote: "I think this mainly comes into play when rendering larger scenes as my memory was allready exhausted." This is correct, except that it would be more accurate to say "only" rather than "mainly". All else being equal, if a Bryce scene fits comfortably into memory and the system doesn't have to write to disk (virtual memory) then adding RAM will not increase render speed for that scene. Of course, it never hurts to add RAM (up to the maximum the operating system can handle). RAM enables bigger scenes to be worked with ease, and enables more multitasking. RAM is your friend. It is commonly said that Bryce runs on raw processing power. This is true, but it is not quite the same thing as saying Bryce runs on raw processor power. The speed of the memory bus will have a smaller but significant effect on render speed. In processing, data is constantly sent back and forth between memory and CPU. The faster that back and forth can happen, the faster rendering will go. Processors spend a lot of their time waiting for data to flow to and from the seriously slower memory system. So more efficient processor and memory bus designs will improve Bryce render speeds, although never to the degree that more grunt added to basic floating point processing power will.

Aye, PJF is dead on with this one. Upgrading to the fastes DDr ram your processor will mate with is also key. Your render will only run as fast as it's slowest link. Graphics cards have NO effect whatsoever on Bryce renders. Bryce was made to run on machines without gaming cards, and it does just that. Hopefully we'll have some hardware acceleration in the future, if they can program Unreal to utilize pixel shaders, they can certainly convert the Material Lab to Direct X 9 specs...

I don't think Bryce's (or any other program's) rendering will ever take advantage of graphics card features. I'm not aware of any flow of processed visual data back to the CPU from a graphics card. A graphics card processes data on the fly for the purpose of throwing it at a monitor (where it is shown for a fraction of a second and then dumped). Bryce already makes some use of hardware acceleration when running its work window in OpenGL or Direct3D. While I'm sure this can be improved in terms of work window textures, etc, it will never increase render speed. There are some special PCI cards about with inbuilt processors with good floating point performance. 3D programs can be written to take advantage of these to speed up rendering. But in our case that would require a Bryce6, and I don't think we're ever going to see one of those.