Increasing rendering speed.

I usually just test out my rendering first see how things will look,
and then once I like what I see I crank up the juice. Not to the max,
but turning on Indirect Illumination (ID) about 3 notches, Global
Illumination (GI) is about 3 notches as well. I have Anit-Aliasing set
to high as well as Ray tracing 5 and 4 for the respective fields.

I am by no means expecting it to finish in less than an hour, but 10
hours seems kind of crazy when it comes to one single render that
isn't even to file, this is just to the screen. I am wondering what
will speed up the time....

- Processor, RAM, or Video Card.

I am working with a 2.4 P4, and 512MB in RAM. Not the fastest thing on
the block, but it does everything else well.

I know that PW cannot be done as a render farm set up so the only other
thing I can see is dual Processors and even then it seems like that
will only increase by about 10-15%

L8tr

 

I use Blender but for a reasonably large model or assy with a bells and
whistles render it is fairly easy to use more than 1GB of both ram and page.
if you load up the settings render times do climb rapidly into hours.
perhaps you could do something simpler with the lighting at a smaller
resolution... my practical 'nice' renders usually are less than an hour or
if I do an animation I try to get less than say 3mins per frame.
HTH
neil