Hi guys Of late, there have been a lot of complaints and a number of serious debates over the speed of Bryce5's render engine. Bryce5 is indeed slower in renders. I have been unable to produce an equal or slower result in Bryce5 when using the nasty 4 (reflection, refraction, bump, volumetrics). If you can render a good image without these, perhaps you should do a tute? lol anyhow, even tho I have not successfully been able to bring the time down to equal or below...I can bring it down to within 3% which is entirely acceptable. However, the method that this requires is silly, but until corel fixes this then here is what to do. In my trial, I used an image that contains all of the nasty 4. This image averaged close to 1 hour for a render. You can see the time differences in the attached image. You can see that a b4 file directly rendered in b5 is a bit slower than if you directly convert it to b5 then reopen it. You can also see that if you ctrl-alt-delete and close everything but the systray, explorer, and bryce5 it is very near the same time as b4. What this is all pointing to is that Bryce thinks it is running in the background all of the time. It does not appear to ever be taking the "primary" window unless YOU tell windows to take it. I have noticed that when you click "render" that the button on the start bar actually pops out. This button is one way that windows determines the program with focus and designates the primary cpu usage. If it is out..then duh..it can be considered "background". Be sure to click it back in. btw, Im not making excuses for the slower renders. Im just trying to help you find a way to bring the times down until Corel gets this problem fixed. Additionally, it should be stated that the Bryce5 download trial is lots slower than the actual version of bryce5. Corel is aware of the problem and is working on it. We can only hope that they fix the slow renders for everyone. oh..and for those of you that wanted to see how much faster b4 rendered when it was the only thing running, that is included in the pict too. In windows, you should ALWAYS be running a memory manager. But for this test, I turned mine off. With it on, it made little difference with only the 3 items running in windows. Windows memory management sucks. Simply installing a freebee mem manager will fix not only Bryce's hog for RAM, but also other program. Get rambooster if you dont already have it and set it to free about 5% of your ram every 30 seconds. Do not accept its default setup (its defaut is every second). Leaving it at that setting will make windows spend more time fixing the ram that doing your renders. hope this helps some...and at least for now you have a way to work around the slow times... BT