this is currently an item under investigation. The new 4.1 from corel seems to be offering varied degrees of render times, especially if any volumetric materials are within the scene. I even read one post on a newsgroup (that had pictures to back it) that said there was ~20x greater render time...tho Im not sure about that, the pictures were entirely different. You have done all the necessary steps to give Bryce the CPU, all except a couple anyhow There is a free program called "rambooster" that reclaims RAM (even while Bryce is running) that appears to help in render times...and a recent discovery by me is implying that having Bryce installed on its own partition (nothing else on it)of a harddrive is giving ~10 faster render times. good luck Brycetech