Chris,
John's answer was right on the money. There were a couple of questions I can
address as well. The best thing you could do for R1 is get R3. Short of that as
you already said more RAM more RAM! <g> Yes 3ds R3 does address redraws and
render speed. I think that actually R3 is faster at higher quality than R2
which was faster than R1 by a fair amount, as I recall. It may depend on
different people's systems, but R3 seems noticeably faster on my network than
R2 was, so I guess it depends. As John said the output is just beautiful. I
like all the features and ease of use of 3DS before R3 but felt the render
quality was lacking. R3 is just the best there is on an PC.
Best advice, get more RAM and upgrade to R3.
-JE