Quote - Still the same, but i can see the black squares reveal in realtime now....  whenever the "being processed" bucket block is over a figure there is a delay as other buckets carry on to render the background, and while all thats happening all the cores are usually between 1 - 15%

When all the buckets are rendering background the cpu shoots right up, hits a figure and back down :|

What are the shaders of the figure like? Large textures without filtering can be very demanding in file I/O, resulting in the CPU having to wait for the hard drive.