I am thinking once again of upgrading my mobo and cpu.  I have been told that AMD is the best for graphics and 3D.  I need to know if Bryce will run on a dual core processor, and if so will there be much improvement?  I have an athlon 2700+ right now.  The motherboard I am looking at will load 4 gigs of memory and has support for my IDE hard drives as well as two additional SATA hard drives.  It also has a PCI Express slot for the video card instead of a AGP slot.

Biostar TForce 6100

It will run fine, yet there most likely will be no speed improvement with rendering as Bryce does not support multiple cpu cores. ;o(

Bryce 6.0 will support dual cores. (from what DAZ states)

I have nothing but great things to say about AMD. I have used an AMD for many years now. (an Athlon 1800+, and now an Athlon 64, 3200+)

What with Bryce 6.0 supporting dual cores, I'm looking at spending $200-$250 on the max my motherboard will accept which is an AMD Athlon 64 (x2) 4200+, and that will literally cut all my Bryce render times in half. (dual core+ increase in Mhz)

Yay for B6 ! Yeah,...........don't expect any really vast improvement in rendertimes. I have a dual dualcore 3.2Ghz 2mbL2 cache Xeon machine running B5 and see only slightly faster rendertimes(about 15 - 20%), however, the 4Gb's of RAM will make working with much larger scene files alot easier(as far as saving and loading too), at least that's been my experience.

I must admit to being an AMD convert with my new box "demonic blue" (I name all my boxes, "My Computer" is sooo pedestrian!) (dual Opteron 280's - 514% faster than the "bambelweeney" (P4 2.4))
Just remember that Windows XP can only handle 4 Gb of RAM total and 1.7 to 2 Gb per app (total of all threads involved). Vista and XP64 are not subject to this memory space mapping issue.

BTW, any else name their boxes? (my old IBM thinkpad is "lo-tek")

HAL 9000.  Thanks for all the encouraging advice.

It has to be said that at the moment the new Intel Conroe chips are ahead of the game and are likely to be for at least 6 months, I've been an AMD supporter for a long time, but all the evidence at the moment says intel.

Intel has done a wonderful job of (what I would call) catching up with AMD. Which however you see it, right now is great for us the consumers as we can get pretty powerful cpu's for less!

And...prices are going to continue to fall as Intel is aiming at getting Quad-Core cpu's out on the mainstream market before the end of the year, and AMD to follow suit within the first few months of 2007.

A friend at work's wife works for Intel, and to be honest they're going big guns to put down the 'upstart' AMD :). Lets face it AMD have managed to grab 20% of the market and Intel have said ouch....

From what I've heard Intel are moving towards 35nm dies (AMD are still on 90!).

And Incarnadine, you're not the only one to name your boxes (mine are named after pets, dead or alive).

B5 runs fine on my X2 3800+. I can actualy have a few bryce renders all happening at the same time which is nice. But you should see C4D go, 8 threads with dual core; he he heeeee.

If Bryce 6 goes multi-render thread  like Cinema to take advantage of more cpus, you are gonna love it.

Boxx's "Apexx 8" (a single tower PC) runs with eight dual cores (AMD 64-bit Opteron's), which is of course sixteen cores, total. And obviously with 128Gb of ram, naturally.

It's harder to get Opteron 280s and up at the moment. Since Dell started using them in their servers, they have been soaking up the supply. 

AS, thats insane.

Its getting to the point where processing power is incomprehensible:L

Bryce rendering in real time, lol.

Well, on a serious note, some video game-makers (UBI/Crytek) are talking about some sort of real-time raytracing in video games, but from what they say, a quad-core would be the minimum needed to do it. (probably 15fps at 640x480, lol)

I thought that was using a hardware raytracing  chip alongside CPU and GPU? a bit like some of the advanced physics chips?