Was just doing some random surfing when I came across this, thing that will be called BunkSpeed.  Its a Render Engine that will use your graphics cards CPU + GPU to render.

http://www.bunkspeed.com/shot/index.html

Interesting! another engine that combines cpu and gpu is Arion:

http://www.randomcontrol.com/arion

imagine if bryce would work with one of these rendererers... how cool would that be!

There is also a brand new kid on the block with GPU rendering: Octane - unbiased render engine, for now it only supports CUDA on NVidia cards. It is - even though its still in beta - lightning fast! - As for rendering BRYCE files - if you convert your model to OBJ format then Octane will be able to render it, as it uses this format as the only input for the moment 

 wow a 3rd GPU-using renderer! this thread is gunna be gold :D

Since Bryce uses its own render engine, if you save the scene out and use an external renderer to render it , can the rendered scene and the scene parameters still be recognized by Bryce and brought back into Bryce for later readjusting?

Whats interesting about the CUDA on NVidia cards is the feature is available on the PC that I'm using to type this and was under $100.

Using the GPU of a video card + CPU is a bonus, and a great idea.

Quote - Since Bryce uses its own render engine, if you save the scene out and use an external renderer to render it , can the rendered scene and the scene parameters still be recognized by Bryce and brought back into Bryce for later readjusting?

Bryce has its own propritary format for it's files, so you cannot use an external renderer directly - however if you export your scene to an OBJ file - which should be possible with the u tag on boolean objects. then you can render it with an external renderer that supports the OBJ format. Another approach could be to import the OBJ file into another 3D application (3DMax, Blender, C4D or whatever - most 3D programs today supports OBJ format) - Many of these then have Exporters for different renderengines - the 3D package i know the best is C4D - and there have been made a bunch of exporters for various render engines (VRay, Indigo, Octane, Thea, Finale RenderStage, Luxrender, Fry and Arion render) - I know theres made a lot of exporters to blender as well, to freeware render engines, and i think that there is a native exporter for Luxrender wich is a freeware unbiased photorealistic renderer - phew ...that was a lot :-)

Quote - Whats interesting about the CUDA on NVidia cards is the feature is available on the PC that I'm using to type this and was under $100.

Using the GPU of a video card + CPU is a bonus, and a great idea.

At the moment i think the only hybrid renderer there is - is Arion. However Indigo - a marvelous renderer has announced they will support both CUDA and openCL (ATI) in the near future. Ocatne renderer supports as many graphics card your motherboard can handle, i don't know if its the same for Arion. Ocaten will not become a hybrid renderer - but who cares if you can put a bunch of cheap graphics card in your computer and have a renderfram :-) :-) :-)