I increased the number samples for anti-aliasing, added contrast threshold and increased the filter size (what are the last two settings anyway? I copied them from the Maya Software high quality render settings) Increase your final gather accuracy and it's point samples. Try a 500 accuracy setting, and a min 50 max 500 point's setting. Now this will increase render time but should show a cleaner and more detailed render. I have been using mental ray for about 5 years and it blows away the maya software renderer. Anyway, a render question this time ( It's a new territory for me so excuse if I'm asking to much of those) : If you are using windows XP go to START/RUN and type in msconfig. This opens the system configuration utility. Select the start up tab and and it will show you all of your background processes that are running. Select anything you don't want running. Other methods would be to do a clean sweep with any spybot and virus remover programs. Also, preform a defrag of your hard drives every couple of weeks or so. This is if your running windows XP. I don't know squat about vista as I don't have it. Here is a unfinished pic from an old maya challenge I entered. It is of a film projector ( I need to finish this thing some day). It was rendered with mental ray, one point light, one area light, and image based lighting. I could not have achieve this kind of quality with the maya software renderer.