I've had Vue 5 for a couple of weeks now and was one of the beta testers for it, so far my favorite and by far the most useful new features are the metablobs (come on, organic modeling!! this is HUGE!!) and the new procedural terrains/textures combination. The Global Illumination and Radiosity features are beautiful but time consuming to say the least, and depending on the scene make very little difference unless you switch back and forth between the two to compare (mostly seems to make the shadowed areas fade into total black more realistically). Don't get me wrong, I'm glad the option is there if I need/want it but for most of my larger outdoor scenes the polygon count and detail are going to make it almost impossible to justify. For now I'm mostly sticking with Global Ambiance, which adds in some of the effect of GI and Radiosity without the huge render time jolt of the higher settings. I've not gotten into HDRI renders at all yet and probably won't until I have a chance to make some decent panoramic photos to really take advantage of it. The render engine is much improved as well (especially if you ignore Vue Pro and consider that Vue 5 is an upgrade to the old Vue 4 Esprit line) and I'm getting ready to post my first new render (meaning not a vue 4 scene re-rendered in 5) within the next couple of days. The last thing I'll mention that right now seems like an annoyance but I can already see will have huge benefits, is the redesigned function editor, which seems to have a lot more options for the advanced user than Vue 4's did. Overall This is a superb upgrade from Vue 4 Esprit but Pro owners will definately want to wait out a few months for Vue 5 Pro which should be incredible.