I am increasingly in need to take the jump to a more powerful Mac. Currently my dual 2.3 G5 is no longer cutting it as far as rendering times. I have to meet stringent deadlines and last night I came to the cold realization that my current setup is no longer up to snuff.  I had to complete two renderings for some advertisements. So I worked diligently setting everything up last night so that I could leave it all rendering. To my surprise only 34% of the first rendering was completed in a period of about 8 hours. It is a complex seen with lots of transparency.

I know there is a delicate balance between final quality of the render, rendering settings, and the time it takes to complete. Unfortunately I am under a lot of pressure to produce this art, and time is increasingly working against me.

My question pertains to anybody that has a MacPro 8 core. Is Carrara able to see all 8 cores? Could my projects rendering times benefit immensely with such setup? I think if I had upgraded this month, these two renderings would have been completed by now.

This morning I had to lower my rendering settings and hope for the best.