Well, since my earlier comment was 'off topic' I'll share some of the info given to me by a good freind and co-worker, who also happens to be the creative director for Smoke & Mirrors. Mac's operating system is the issue. It's written in a language that has to do something like three times as many translations as Windows, which is closer to machine language relatively speaking. This is the issue first and foremost. This is why there a very few professional level (ie. Houdini, 3DS Max, SoftImage, ART Renderdrives, etc.) graphics products available for Mac. Bryce is a toy. Poser is a nice toy. I have and continue to use them both. In fact I used poser in a spot I did for Kill Bill. But it takes ten steps to do something that takes two in any of the aforementioned packages. So that old 'They started off on Mac' arguement is silly. If you want speed, save up and get yourself ten of those little $400 Dell desktops and build a render farm. A single computer is foolish when it comes to 3D Graphics. Or get yourself a PC with a PURE graphics card, I guarantee it'll render a Poser scene in less time than it takes you to set up the preferences in the Firefly renderer.