I got a new G4 350 a couple of months of ago and was very happy with the rendering speed on Bryce 4. I did many different renders in different resolutions and a couple of animations. Very fast, very happy. Now, for some reason, it's slow as hell. When I do a render that took 20 minutes before, it's now taking 20 hours !! I've tried the very same images that I rendered before, and they're taking ALOT longer than before. Usually, the first render/screen pass is very fast, but then the rendering line sort of stops for a while, then continues. The third pass is extremely slow that I just quit. I just tried rendering an image (3400 x 2200) that took about 35 minutes to finish before. It's been almost 2 DAYS!! and it's still not finished, so I just quit. So, I'm thinking, what have I installed / done, that could have affected this? I can't think of anything. The only programs that I've installed before the slowness occurred have been Canoma and Carrarra, both from Metacreations. No new hardware has been installed and the only update I've done has been for OpenTransport from the Apple updater. This is what I've done so far to resolve this but no luck. 1. Have reinstalled Bryce in a different folder 2. Have reinstalled Bryce on another drive (SCSI) 3. Have rebuilt my desktop 4. Have checked for hardrive errors (they're all ok) 5. Have ran Conflict Catcher (no errors reported) 6. Have started Bryce with minimal (Mac OS 9.0 Base) extensions. 7. Have updated Bryce to ver. 4.0.1 8. Have allocated for memory to Bryce (from 100 megs to 150 megs) My system: Sawtooth G4 350 320 Megs of RAM (added 256 module) ATI 128 Rage Pro Additional UW2 SCSI drive Additional Ultra DMA 66 drive Virtual memory is OFF Disk cache is set to default: 8160 K Could I have a bad CPU or overheating? Bad memory or graphics card? Please, let me know if you have any suggestions. Thanks so much, Manolo

My first operation would be to check the memory. If you just installed a 256M module, it may be incompatible with the memory you have in there. Depending on the motherboard and processor and chip set, in some computers, new memory has to exactly match installed memory. That would be the first thing I would check. The CPU could have gone bad, but if it had you would have noticed problems in your other programs as well, or it would simply not function. I know nothing about Macs, so I can't really go any further than that. But basically it sounds as if the memory is incompatible or faulty. Your graphics card wouldn't affect render time. Render all takes place in CPU, floating point processor and memory, and it loops in the temp file of your hard drive, at least that's where Bryce puts it's loop file.

If the memory problem isn't it, uninstall carrerra and canoma and see what happens. I don't know why they would conflict, but computers are weird, if you try to install too many pieces of software or hardware at one time they get glitchy sometimes. You can always reinstall them if that doesn't solve the problem.

i would say check the memory...you might have a leak or some of it (depending on how many boards of ram u have) could have gone bad. this is one reason why i dont like useing mac's...these things are hard to check. u might also think of getting adifferent videocard in the future...its a ok card but if u want to do more or serious rendering then it will be slowing you down a LOT in the long run. as for the glitchy software idea...most likely not..there might be a conflict if you have more then one program running at a time but if this problem happens when only one is running then it shouldnt change anything. also the card "can" effect the render. say u use openGl, well that comes from your card not your cpu. and if u installed the extra ram make shure it is in the right way and all the way...part way might cause a conflict that it is trying to deal with. plus it might not match the other ram...ram must have the same clock as each other to work effitiently. as for overheating...it wouldnt just happen..it would happen part way threw the render if at all and most likely not ever. remember even though the mac has a high rating for speed it is still only a 350mhz (in your case) and people with higher mhz put there comps threw mor sh*t then what u are doing and they keep on running. oh well i think that should be enough to get u going...godd luck msg me if u need some more help, i am glad to help if i can -phillycheese81

That's true, if a pin was bent on the memory when it was installed, that would cause problems, or if it isn't properly seated, or matches the preinstalled memory.

I dunno about apples, but in a PC, faulty memory can slow the computer down or cause strange errors. Also, if memory is mismatched it can slow down. You can also, on a PC, I must stress I don't know Macs, have too much memory. Some motherboards have an optimum amount of memory, and if you go over that it can slow the machine way down. I'd experiment with the memory. Take the 64M out if that's what it is, and see how it runs with the 256M rack. Take the 256M out and see if it speeds up again. switch the position of the two modules. Sometimes a simple thing like where you put the memory can affect it. Some motherboards are real picky about how you arrange the memory. If I had the problem on the PC, the first thing I would do is to uninstall any new software I had put on before the problem started. If that wasn't the problem, then I would work on the memory. I'm assuming Mac memory is the same as PC memory, so the problems would essentially be the same,

oh ya i forgot....VIRUS CHECK

Well if it bad memory you will get error across the board not just in Bryce. I have had Bryce do this several times since I bought it and it has something to do with two things. One Bryce sets aside swappable space within it's program folders and if scenes / objects get opened , changed or saved too many times Bryce slows down alot to access this data. One thing I did to resolve this was to delete all my previously saved scenes and objects , only if you have a final of your scene though - don't delete this if you're still working on it. Two , Windows allocates swappable virtual drive space. It usually is set on auto and uses almost all your current drives empty space. You can set this to about 1 gig or half your current drive space. This sometimes forces Bryce to virtually swap memory more efficiently. I also de-fragged and things went back to normal and as a last resort re-installed Bryce. All these things worked for me and I doubt your memory is bad or you'd get tons of "vcache.vxd errors" on any application exceeding about 256-512kb of memory.

This applies to Apple products as well , though I believe you have to do it in a different manner. Also I don't believe Mac OS has some of those Windows features mentioned above but Bryce still uses virtual space within it's own program folders.

It may be that the install for Canoma and Carrara have overwritten your previous versions of OpenGL/Quicktime & Quickdraw3D with newer/older extensions that are not compatible. The "latest version is not always the best version for some apps. Have you checked the Macfixit site for any info? Does this problem happen if you "render to disk" and/or to screen? See info about "sleep mode" below & try that or search this site for possibilities: http://www.macfixit.com/reports/g4.shtml Power Mac G4 (AGP Graphics) wake-from-sleep problem: According to a new Apple TIL article (#58451): "When the Power Mac G4 (AGP Graphics) enters sleep mode with a single channel PCI SCSI card installed, the computer may incorrectly assume the card supports PCI power down mode and not wake properly from sleep. The only workaround is to disable system sleep in the Energy Saver control panel. This issue will be fixed..........

I assume you've checked render options like "spatial optimization" and anti-aliasing. Make sure anti-aliasing and Spatial Opt are set to "low." Go to your extensions manager and switch to the OS8/9 ALL set, restart, and try again. There could be an extension conflict. -sk

Also, you may want to check the "Energy Saver" control panel on the G4. If it's "on" it may slow down when there is no mouse or keyboard input. Turn it off and see if that helps.

Thanks to everyone for yur suggestions and input. Unfortunately, I'm still in the hole. I just purchased Techtool Pro and it's giving me no memory errors (or any kind of errors). I've done all that you have suggested above. The only thing I can think of now is that (as someone suggested) I'm opening the same image over and over and this is affecting something within the program. If you guys have the time, can you please post the render time it'll take you to render a "normal" image. Please post, time, resolution and processor type. Also, it normal anti-alias is applied. This is just to get an idea so that I can do some comparisons. Again, thanks to everyone.

I have an AMD k6-2 500 Mhz with 64 megs of memory. An average render time for me is somewhere around 40 minutes, but I've had images take up to 19 hours to render, depending on how many objects are in a scene and what materials are used.

Perhaps someone could specify the parameters for a "Test-Render" scene (size, settings & objects, from the default Bryce objects on the CD), etc. Then we could post our times from various system configurations. That way people could post their times to get some type of benchmark to test their own system to see if something was amiss.

I think the only way to have a true test is for someone to post a test scene. People can dl the scene and render it as is. There are too many variables, otherwise. -sk