Quote - I need to pump out commerical level renders in 8-10 minutes tops.

He he. Sounds like you probably need to invest in a commercial level set up then?

A fairly high-end one at that.

Otherwise it sounds like you're between a rock and a hard place. Get something that looks less good and get it faster. Or wait for what can be a much better result, if you can use it properly.

That said I've got a quad core imac with 16 GB ram and it will certainly enable Firefly to pump out a render of a straight forward scene, with just one or two figures and not too involved a backdrop or envsphere panorama, with IDL and SSS enabled and maybe 1 or 2 ray trace bounces, maybe between 3 and 7 IDL bounces, in around 10 minutes. That's running with between 6 and 8 threads set...

So if you're on 8 cores, it doesn't sound out of the question for simpler scenes, to achieve those render times... if you've also got enough memory?

...I guess it all depends on how complex the scene you're rendering is really.

My final quality render times are generally ridiculously long, solely, as I've realised, because my finished scenes end up being so crammed.

I don't know how Firefly benchmarks against the likes of V-Ray for speed?

But for the comparisons I can make, against Vue and Lux, it seems to perform pretty well.

I think of it as sending my drawn artwork off to another department / artist for colouring / inking... i.e. there's a real world lead-time to be accounted for in the creative process.

I just plan around having to wait for a render to complete... and with the background render option and / or Queue Manager, I can work on one scene while another is rendering.

Or, more often, I can go and do something else altogether...

;-)