BT - yeah I was starting to suspect the 50% thing may have been an hyperthreading issue from what I've been reading on the web about other peoples problems with other renderers and HT. Thats interesting about the premium render settings. Gonna have to give that a try on those three scenes and see what happens. "millions, or even billions of rays" or trillions or quadrillions... Thanks for that BT :) (and is there any way (someone to annoy a lot) to get the old bryce 5 opengl added back into the 5.5 opengl options - it seems to deal with the lighting in the scene better than 5.5 does).

Dreams are just nightmares on prozac...
Digital WasteLanD