Its looks as if from the subjects raised on this forum that Vue5 has a few bugs, have most of them been addressed do you think? I am tossing up as to if I should bother upgrading from Vue 4 at this time or should I wait for a bit.

I was about to ask the same question, so I am looking forward to the replies you get on this subject.

To me it has been as stable as vue 4. Redertimes many be slightly slower, but thats because of new lighting features. Renders look much better. I am very pleased with Vue 5. I have experienced NO glitches whatsoever. Running P4 3GHz, 1 meg mem, windows xp ser pack 2. All is fine.

actually, on a per quality basis im sure that vue5s render times is faster then vue4. YOU can of course increase the rendertimes alot by using all the new bells and whistles as far as lightning goes, but if we were to render with the exact same settings in both apps and with the exact same scene im more then positive that vue5 will come out on top.

Well, this stability discussion is always a little difficult. Stability depends on so much system issues - beside the stability of the application itself. I can say that Vue 5 for me is a smooth and easy to handle application. Of course i miss some Pro features but i honestly prefer Vue 5 most right now - from all versions i have. Of course too there are some minor things that need to be checked and corrected. As always when you make such a transition from one version to the next one. Look at Windows itself - how the transition from Windows 2000 to Windows XP was and still is. I did a little comparison about rendering times. As everybody can do it themselves. Create scene in Vue 4, load it in the different versions, render it and see. 800x600 pixel image ........... V4 ................. V5 ................ 4 Pro preview ............................... 46" ................. 52" ................. 49" final .................................. 3'13"............... 3'30"................ 3'36" broadcast ........................... 8'17"................ 5'31"................ 7'18" superior ............................... -.................. 12'05"............... 12'38" ultra ................................ 12'55"............... 22'04".............. 36'06" Maybe you try it out for yourself. As war2 said, with the increased light settings you can change the rendering times easily - but the image quality too. Fact is, that i render some of my old scenes in Vue 5 with global illumination (mostly) again right now and replace the images in my gallery. I did three already and will do more over time. The quality of the Vue 5 renders is so much better with the new settings. Mad Mouse II in my gallery is an example for such a re-rendering. Ok, you don't see the old version, but the new one looks terrific (i think).

As far as stability, it seems the more I use it, the more stable it becomes. There is the memory issue, but I've had problems with large scenes in other versions. One thing alone has made a big difference - Procedural terrains. Not only do they render better, but I just converted a mountainous terrain in a Vue4 scene to a procedural terrain. The polygon count went from 2,600,00 to 462. I'm impressed.+

well i have found the Mac vue 5 is way more stable than 4 on G5's the only thing that have had crash with Vue is the Procedurul terrains... they work., just don't use an "effect" other than that... runs great

I've only had crashes when working with materials, I've donwloaded the beta patch, but have yet to have the opprtunity to test. I will post back late tommorrow & let all know if I was able to complete a scene. I had 1 95% complete, when I decided to create a new mat and bam all gone. I have started it over but am only around 10% towards completion.

My personal experience is that Vue 5 is as stable as the latest releases of 4/4 Pro. I can get it to crash (easily) if I hit RAM usage of around 1.6 GB. This is similar to what I see in Vue Pro. I love the new render modes and the procedural terrains seem to work farily well. It is a nice upgrade from Vue 4 and even from Vue Pro in a lot of respects. I quite enjoy it. I'm running XP Pro, Dual Athlon MPs (2600) with 2 GB of RAM. Oh, video card is 256MB Radeon 9800.

I'm back to the same I was, with a scene I was doing & NO crashes!!! I've been messing with materials & procedurals & all is good. I'm at about 7.5mil polys at this point & am getting some slow down in the ability to move objects around, that said, I have a lot of foliage-trees in the scene, so I'm not that surprised. But the good news, is no crashes, since I've applied the Beta patch :). Back to work I go :)