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)."

This is not my "second childhood". I'm not finished with the first one yet.

Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.

"I'd like to die peacefully in my sleep like my grandfather....not screaming in terror like the passengers on his bus." - Jack Handy