Weird. Everything Nerd listed works just the opposite for me. 1.)Higher bucket = faster rendering 2.)Lower shading rate = faster rendering (as manual states) 3.)Backface polygons don't seem to influence render speed 4.)smoothing does produce strange warping on some body parts. But rather than tossing the smoothing function away completely. I just uncheck the smoothing option on that one body part. The smoothing works really nice with low res models. I wonder why we get opposite effects from the same settings? I'm currently running using the app patch only (SR-1b). ScottA