Quote - > Quote - Well I've set the unfiltered image_map textures to be filtered to either "crisp" or "quality"... based on your point about disk access, for texture reference, being a likely source of threading bottlenecking, I've also tried optimising various other textures (e.g. by shrinking the pixel sizes of texture image files for anything not in close up) and that large scene is now rendering much faster, with much higher CPU utilisation.

Shrinking textures is not necessary. One of the main motivations for the texture cache was to be able to handle many large textures while still using modest amounts of memory.

Ah, okay, thanks Stewer... cool. In that case having the texture filtering set to "none" on just two figures was what was apparently causing the major bottleneck for the IDL and Render passes. Good to know!

Cheers