Hello I am just getting back in to Bryce after a lay off. This answer was in the Bryce Forum years ago but I have lost it. It was stated at that time there was a selection somewhere in Bryce that one could select so that the CPU used all cores available for rendering. Can someone help me out as to the setting in Bryce 7.1 if this is still available?

Thank you Don

From Horo, Bryce programmer and user extraordinaire: "Bryce handles up to 8 processors, virtual or real ones. When in the development stage of 7.0/7.1, we had 16 supported cores for a moment. Each thread needs memory and Bryce, still being a 32 bit application with a 2 GB limit (which can be pushed up to about 3.2 GB by making it Large Address Aware), it was a question of how advanced computers the majority has. The compromise finally was 8 cores.

There is a priority setting in the render options. Low Priority uses just 1 core, Normal Priority half and High Priority all - where all is 8.

Network rendering also uses only 8 cores at max, provided the host is set to High Priority, all clients use all cores up to 8 as well. You can network render on one machine, but the overhead makes it slower than a direct render. I have on my Win 7 a virtual XP and 2000 installed and I can use three machine in one for network rendering. However, the virtual XP and 2000 only get one core, no more. So this scheme isn't of any help.

Not all is lost, though. Provided your machine has the memory, you can open several instances of Bryce and render at High Priority on each instance. In your case, you could render 3 scenes at high priority and get all 24 cores busy. If you render animations, you can cut it in 3 and render each part in another instance of Bryce at full throttle. Then assemble the 3 parts with a movie application.

A virtual core - a multithreaded virtual one - is not as powerful as a real core. It can take over between 10% and 20% of the work, while the real core takes 100% or nearly so. My best machine sports a i7, 4 core multithreaded and I've tested this. The next worse machine sports an i3, 4 core, not multi-threadable. It performs at over 60% of the i7, not just 50% or less (an i3 is less powerful than an i7)."

Thank you for your reply. I also have an old I7 2600 that is still rolling along. I will try the High Priority setting which I hope will use all 4 cores.. I am having to go back and re-render many of my early Bryce images as stretching them from the old 800x600 render to now 1920x1080 has resulted in some anomalies. I basically render pics for myself to use as backgrounds. Thank you for your help, Don

Thanks Breakbryce4 and tjohn. I had forgotten about that and will immediately benefit.