There are lots of things you can do to decrease render time. first: memory will not help your render time very much at all. The only time it will help is when you (a)have a very large and/or complex scene and (b)you have enough real RAM that the computer doesn't have to swap to the hard drive (using virtual memory). Having more memory will, however, let you manipulate larger scenes with more lights, before Bryce crashes on you complaining about "not enough memory". Make sure you're not running other applications in the background. If you're listening to MP3 music from your computer, for God's sake turn it off! Decoding MP3's is a sure-fire way to slow down your render process. The only real way to reduce render time is to reduce scene complexity (or to buy a faster computer). Often this can be done without sacrificing quality. The big killers for render time are: 1) highly complex textures 2) volumetric materials 3) lots of light objects 4) highly detailed imported DXF/OBJ meshes etc. If you have lots of lights, you can cut down by using 'fake' lights for the smaller/distant lights... just use a sphere with the ambience setting really high. Unless the texture is going to be viewed close-up, complex textures are a great way to bore yourself watching the little render progress line march down the screen. Simplify textures on distant objects. If you're running on anything slower than a G3 you're going to be somewhat disappointed in Bryce's performance, no matter what you do. I upgraded from an old 7200/90 to a G4/400 last year and did test renders: the G4 took under 1/2 hour on my detailed test file, and the 7200 took over 17 hours!