Hi Ultrop Your scene setup is interesting as there doesn't seem to be much in the way of morph target overheads so the pmd problem may not be a factor. We haven't as yet run a definitive set of tests for the rendering costs although it may be worth tuning down the maximum texture resolution to 512 or 256 to see if that makes a difference. If you are suffering from general problems loading the scene it may also be a good idea to switch the display mode to Sree3D (SW) rather than the OpenGL display in the General Preferences. There may well be some as yet untested limits in the use of the OGL buffers that could impact performance or even prevent complex scenes from loading. Stewer - interseting image. I hadn't actually thought about using Gather to illuminate the entire scene as a replacement to IBL/AO, rather to pick up colour bleed from nearby objects. Long rays will, of course, increase rendering times due to more intersections being tested across greater distances. Another problem with using long rays is that as the rays spread throughout a scene they will start picking a diverse scatter of different illumination values from different areas of the scene, which may end up causing random artifacts in the final colour. To compensate you could increase the number of rays, but at that point you may as well be using IBL/AO or light probe as the result is going to end up being an averaged out measure of the incident light. The speckling effect in your image is something that I found as well and couldn't really shift except by turning the intensity down, which is probably how it should be used anyway. Bill