Mac Pro, graphics and 3d HDR rendering, is the GPU the bottleneck?

We purchased a Mac Pro, 2x2.66, gForce 7300, 2 GB ram, and is has been a beauty.
When we do our standard 3d rendering, Activity monitor would cap at 400% usage for Vectorworks (rendering/modeling) which I saw a 4 cores X 100%. Great!!
Then I started using HDRI technology to render our models, and now I am noticing that the core do not max out, and each only reaches about 75% mac, so that totals about 300% in Activity Monitor. All 4 cores are processing, but not @ 100 %. There are no other apps running, and once I take away the HDRI info, they jump up to 100%
THis makes me think there is a bottle neck now, which I am assuming is the GPU, as i believe the HDRI is very GUP intensive.
Is this correct? Is my new computer getting bogged down by the GPU? Is there a way to see what the GPU processor is doing, like Activity Monitor shows for the CPUs? single image rendering time jumped from 2 min, to close to 20 min.
Thanks for your input.
Spinner
Mac Pro 2.66 Ghz Mac OS X (10.4.7)

Rendering in FP16 or FP32 is a lot more computationally expensive, so the card is probably still working before the driver gets the signal to process the next chunk. That lag translates to less CPU usage in between operations of some type.
If you are doing this professionally the Quadro card may be appealing and justifiable. I may be wrong, but I thought I read at one point the floating-point precision is higher in the Quadro drivers which is another bonus (better quality rendering).
While it seems like there's an inefficiency here (why aren't my CPU's maxed!) the real test and issue is speed. Benchmark the two and use that as your metric to find bottlenecks. CPU usage fluctuations when rendering can sometimes just be unoptimized code in the drivers or shaders.
Good luck.

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User Contributed Tips in the Mac Pro Displays and the Mac Pro forum

*The following User Contributed Tips are located in the Mac Pro > Displays and the Mac Pro forum:*
None at this time.
*The following related tips are located in other areas of Apple Discussions:*
a brody - Using a second Mac as a display for a first
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1587927
Publish date: July 7, 2008
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