I'm now seeing quad core machines at the local electronics store. 
Can Bryce take advantage of quad core in rendering?
Which version of Windows is necessary?  I'm not sold on Vista.

And what  about the new wide screen format monitor displays?  How will the changed aspect ratio effect more common image sizes when printed for framing?

Thanks for trying to educate this computer dummy.

I can't speak about Bryce, but Vue does beneft from such, so I'd suspect Bryce should 9at least newer versions?).

COmparing my p4 3ghz Intel art renderer PC, to my new gaming/secondary render machine (Core Duo 2,33 GHZ E6550 CPU), the new machine renders at more than twice the speed, about x2.5 as fast (it's also got a more recent motherboard etc which may help too).

Folk posting render times show substantial icnreases with quad cores to duo (though tehcnically they aren't actualy TRUE quad cores iirc?)

lol, just think, 10 years from now we could and hopefully will have, real time rendering! ;)

I have run Bryce 6 on all 4 cores in my box. 2xOpteron 280 (4 core total) and I believe others here have as well. Not sure how the new intel 4 core work out but it should not be too different.

Quote - I have run Bryce 6 on all 4 cores in my box. 2xOpteron 280 (4 core total) and I believe others here have as well. Not sure how the new intel 4 core work out but it should not be too different.

Is this automatic in Bryce 6? or does it need some User intervention?

Bryce handles all four cpu's in my dual dual-core opteron system at the studio where i work perfectly :-) My guess is that it wont be different with a single quad-core cpu as the software should only care about the fact that there are 4 logical cpu's not about the way their hardware has been implemented.

I would think (I'm still using a uni-core(n..;) that worst case would be that Bryce would run off of a single core...depends on the bus, threading, and all those other technical terms. The real question would be would you see a performance improvement?..;)

Bryce can handle it easily. :-)

"Is this automatic in Bryce 6? or does it need some User intervention?" Within Bryce 6.1 the CPU priority can be set to 1, 1/2 or all of the cores. This does not result in 4X render speed but it's a huge render speed increase over a single or dual core system.

there's always an overhead when using multiple processors, but bryce defenately takes a serious performance boost out of multiple cores.

I understood that a dualcore was x2 a single core and a quadcore was x2 a dualcore, so with that analagy, a quadcore should be utilised fully by Bryce 6 and above.

Dhama, that's true of the intel chips, but the new AMD ones (called the phenom) are genuinely triple or quad core. It doesn't make a great deal of difference to end performance though, there's a slight increase in work per cycle by having the fully independent cores versus the dual dual core (which AMD are hoping to exploit and get some ground back in the market place...).

To go beyond 2 cores you must have XP pro, vista (or of course Linux :) ). XP Home is capped to use 2 cores per processor.

Quote -
To go beyond 2 cores you must have XP pro, vista (or of course Linux :) ). XP Home is capped to use 2 cores per processor.

It is? i was led to believe XP home couldn't utilise dual core, and only XP pro, win2000 and Vista etc. could.

The Intel quad has four cores on a common die. To communicate between cores, they have to talk out to the mainboard and back in. The AMD has four cores on a die but a different architecture that lets the chips talk direct core to core. This should yield a speed bonus for multi-thread apps. That is the theory anyway.

Nope XP home is supposed to support Dual Core chip, but not more then 2 and only one processor. I don't have it so I can't test it to prove it!

I use XP Pro with a dual core and Bryce works fine. Huge improvement in render times.

Quote - "Is this automatic in Bryce 6? or does it need some User intervention?" Within Bryce 6.1 the CPU priority can be set to 1, 1/2 or all of the cores. This does not result in 4X render speed but it's a huge render speed increase over a single or dual core system.

WHAT???!!! You mean Byce 6.1 can actually use the entire CPU on my venerable hyperthreaded P4 3.2GHz machine?? What a revelation! I always wondered why it only seemed to use 50% of the CPU and no matter what I did in Task Manager, it never helped at all! The solution was right under my nose! (For those who don't know, its under Render Options, Priority - can't believe I never saw it before!) A big Thank You to Dan Whiteside for pointing that out, but you really should've told me before I did a render that took over 25 days!! :-)

Its like having a new computer!

You're welcome SH, it's not well documented. One thing to keep in mind is that the priority is not saved with the file so if you save and restart a render it returns to the default priority.

 *so if you save and restart a render it returns to the default priority

*..and here's me thinking that I must get around resetting my default page.

Sunset hunter wrote 
"(For those who don't know, its under Render Options, Priority - can't believe I never saw it before!) "

I've looked under Render Options in Bryce but can't see 'priority' - do you mean Optimizations>Aggressive?

HI IO4,

It's only in Bryce v6.1 - do you have this version? Like dan said, its not well documented and though its mentioned as a new feature in the pdf version of the 6.1 Help File, it doesn't actually say where the feature is! I'm not in front of Bryce at the moment, but here goes...

No, its not optimisation, but you'll find it under the 'Render Options' menu (the lowest little triangle on the left hand side of the main Bryce Window - near the trackball?) Anyway, when you click on that, it brings up a menu - there is a menu item called Priority (its either the 2nd or 3rd item in the list). Select Priority and then you'll see three options - Low, Medium (the default) and High. Set it on High, and then you're renders will complete mcuh faster! Open up the Task Manager in Windows to see the difference - on the Medium setting, Bryce only ever utilises a maximum of about 50% of the CPU - select the High priority setting in Bryce though, and it'll utilise 100% of the CPU! Thats more like it! :-)

Thanks so much Sunset Hunter! - I found it:)