Upgrading to Vue 11 Studio may help. Seems like your using old software with newer hardware. I've got Vue 10 Studio, but before that I had Vue 11 Frontier, but downgraded to Vue 10 Studio, since I could get someone license. When rendering the same scene in Vue 11 and Vue 10, Vue 11 is about 25-30% faster. I know Vue 10 is roughly 25-30% faster when rendering then Vue 9, so if Vue 9 is faster then Vue 8 is, you could gain a lot.

I bought a new pc a while back. Before doing so I asked people to render a test scene on their machine to compare various computers. Quite some people participated and I did notice one thing..... on similair setups the render speeds would roughly be the same, only a few percent different. Some of those machines were custom build highly optimised, but they weren't much faster then stock machine that weren't optimised at all. You can add SSD, tweak your RAM, cut your background processes, but it will only decrease your render time a few percent.

The thing that will really speed up your renders is getting a faster CPU or even better more cores, but I'm not sure if Vue 8 Studio restricts the number of cores you can use as Vue 10/11 do to 8 cores max.

You can also tweak your render settings and see render decrease that way, but there is a limit to that. I've found that my scenes loose quality is your take it to far. But you can sure gain by tweaking.

The other option may be upgrading your Vue version.... if you can figure out if Vue 9 is faster then Vue 8. Even if Vue 9 has the same render speeds as Vue 8 or is only a little faster, you still will see renders speeding up a lot by going to 11.

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Due to the childish TOS changes, I'm not allowed to link to my other products outside of Rendo anymore :(

Food for thought.....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYZw0dfLmLk