I finally figured out what VUE means. It is not a synonym of the word "view", it is an acronym that stands for

Virtually
Unuseable
Engine.

I have tested xStream on several machines now. The latest was a Sony VAIO with 2 gigs of DDR2 Ram, 256 mb of dedicated video memory, and Core 2 DUO processor. (running Windows XP)

The viewport manipulation was "OK" but the render times for one simple scene with NO objects, just a simple sky as 640 x 480 resolution was PAINFULLY slow... a few minutes for one frame. Anything else rendering in Mental Ray on that machine, even a scene with raytracing and tons of polygons, renders in seconds.

I don't know how anyone can make full blown movies with this software on the average consumer system. the movies that you see in the demo.... I wonder WHAT kind of machine those were made on, and if they used a render farm to render them, or maybe they were just made using vue INFINITE.

That's probably what it is..... people were probably using infinite to render those scenes. xStream is just not very useable from a rendering standpoint if you're using Animation. I've seen people with 4 gigs of Ram and still having problems with xStream inside of Max. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Attached Link: http://forums.cgsociety.org/forumdisplay.php?f=162

You might get a better response from people who have used xStream a lot if you share your experience there.

thanks.

xStream is remarkbly unstable inside of the host app. In standalone mode it is very flaky but it sort of works. Sorry I can't be of any other assistance.