Well I haven't delved into it just yet ( I just installed 5 on my PC today). I'm going to attempt to do a Network render from a Mac with a PC. I hope it will work because in 5 things have greatly slowed down. With the higest setting on, a simple rendering can take up to 12 hours to complete. Hmmm I don't like it but it does make a better render. But to answer your question. A network render allows 2 or more machines to render 1 image, delegating different parts of the render to different machines. In essence you're getting a duel processor render with 2 machines. So rendering will in theory take less time. This is how the large animation studios get their jobs done. You have several machines running and rendering parts and pieces of the same image to speed things up. I hope that clears up at least a little bit of the process. James