Joke...do you HAVE Bryce 5? Some people have posted that Bryce 5 rendering time on a specific Bryce 4 scene was a bit slower. Not on all scenes. In fact others have posted that Bryce 5 renders most Bryce 4 scenes slightly faster. If you add premium options it does slow the render, or you can reduce the RPP etc and speed it up...at the cost of quality. For soft shadows in Bryce 4 many used light arrays which slowed rendering times to a crawl. It's simply the nature of the beast. Other packages which claim fast speeds at ray-tracing are actually using hybrid renderers and shadow mapping..not true ray tracing...and the quality difference often shows. Spit