Hey guys,

I've been using my old beat up Pentium 2 to render Bryce animations. It's taking about 15 mins for a 6 second clip of basic stuff like one mountain, 1 cube and a sky.

I'm looking to get a new PC and was wondering what parts are good for reducing rendering time. Is it graphics cards? RAM? CPU? Scratch memory?

Thanks

Software rendering is purely CPU. So that is the big one for render times.

Graphics cards have nothing to do with software rendering. They are for GPU (hardware assisted) rendering and viewport performance. If you are going for real-time (or game performance), then you need really beefy card(s).

RAM, more the merrier. It won't increase your render speed, but you can handle heavier scenes. The only time RAM is an issue is if you don't have enough and have to page virtual memory (you page it all the time anyhow; but if it has to replace physical RAM, then it's a bottleneck).
2GB is all that a 32-bit program can use, unless you tamper with your boot.ini, then it can address 3GB. That is free RAM, so subtract OS and background process usage. 4GB is super for Bryce.

If you get 64-bit OS, then any 64-bit program can access as much RAM as you have. It's something like 17 billion GB. Then 4GB isn't so super, but is still probably adequate, unless you plan on animating The Battle of the Pelennor Fields.

Oh right!

Thanks so much