Hi, I have Bryce 4 on a 500 mhz P3 with a 5400 rpm hard drive, and am preparing to buy a 1.4 ghz Athlon with a 7200 rpm hard drive. Can I expect any faster rendering by Bryce? Thanks.

If you do it on screen rendering, Yes, but hope you buy one with a minimum 256 MB RAM, because you will need it. I am Using a P3 866 with 256 RAM and i saw a difference from my P3 550 with 128 MB of ram. Pleiades

Yes you will, especially if you go for the ddr ram and 266 bus. Bryce uses processor speed, not video speed so an upgrade in processor works just fine. Money aside, I heard the 1.5g intel chip (if you can stomach intel) uses a 600mhz bus. The 1.33 Tbird athelon is supposed to do that too but there are no MB's out there that support it. A 600mhz FSB has got to render faster than a 266 fsb.

OH, HD speed doesn't matter unless you render to disk or go into the swap drive after running out of ram.

more than 7200rpm, find an ATA 100 and get the ATA 100 80 pin cable and a board that supports it. Otherwise, go scsi, but the ATA 100 is pretty fast for an IDE drive.

Only thing that will spped up actual render time is a faster cpu and more ram, a faster video card will only increase your screen redraw while in shaded, opengl or directx mode. Ken

you may see a small increase. I ran bryce on a 933 mhz P3 with 384 Mbyte ram and only noticed a marginal improvment over the same image rendered on a P2 300 mhz 128 mbyte system. You will hit a wall with the bryce rendering engine, the code of the render engine, is the limiting factor. After a certain point the bryce software is the liiting factor.

Vaguly remember seeing something about you can now get multi-processor AMD motherboards. Anyone using one or know of any recommendations for one? In anticipation of B5 and its new features - whatever they turn out to be. Also are there any performance monitors for Win 98SE around? Would like to see if my machine is currently maxing out the memory or the processor during rendering. I have a P2 450 with 256Mb. If you turn on the volumetric world at the lowest quality and density it dies a death (28 hours for a single frame render.)

Wow, Thanks to everyone. Very helpful! LR

Such is the Mac architecture that If you had gone from the pIII 500 to a single processor G4 500, you'd have noticed an imense difference since any OS before OSX doesnt support true multiprocessing, neither does Bryce. So with the new OS you'll see (I hope!) an even larger speed up!

Very cool talking about processors and memory... But I'm working on a PIII800mhz, with 384 mb's of ram, but I'm still not satisfied on the rendertimes... some projects take me 30 minutes to render on 640480, so I didnt do the final 1024768 yet. Isn't your videocard highly involved in this rendering business?

Processor speed is not the entire key. A MB that has a bottleneck on the FSB is like death to Bryce. You need to match hardware. Make sure you have the BIOS configured right. I can make my athelon 550 sing faster than many intel 800's just by tweaking. That being the case, imagine what the right tweaking will do for a 1.2g. Oh, I'm an AMD fan and for many reasons. Just built a 1.2g / 266 server for work. Lightening fast on some things, slow on others. It depends on what the application needs and Bryce needs fast processor and wide open ram. You do the fast cpu and don't bottleneck the ram and you'll be running like a raped ape (and raped apes do run very fast). Just cuz you have a 1.2g AMD doesn't mean its running at 266 bus. You have to configure the bios and heaven forbid that you got a bad MB. I recognized a bad Gigabyte board second day the server was up. Took two experts and a week of tech support to confirm that. I'll never buy a Gigabyte board again, or any board that has software controlled bios settings. Put the settings on the chip or its outta here.

Bryce renders slow compared to most other programs, no matter what computer your on! It's the only real drawback about the program. It's just something you have to accept, no matter what, it's going to be slow at rendering,but it's worth the results. Hopefully Bryce 5 will have a faster render engine. Bryce has a different type of render engine than any other 3D program, it handles 3D objects in a non traditional manner. Even if you had a 1.5 Ghz processor with 512 MB of DDR, the render times would only be improved by a marginal amount,it's just the nature of the beast.

Dave, Dude! You rock! Thanks. LR

Im hoping that Bryce 5 will support the Altivec(velocity engine) on the Mac G4. Any software that i have which supports this smokes versions which dont. It really burns me that a lot companies dont implement full compatibility with the G4, they basically tie one arm behind the back of the processor. RonGC

In response to cuddlejacket, I have a 700 MHz Celeron processor with 384 megs of ram in my system. I run Windows 2000 Pro. When I open up the task manager and check the memory usage when I am rendering I have noticed that Bryce is using about 219 - 230 megs of ram to render images. ;o)