Quote -  An interesting line of recommendations......

For my part, I have no wish to fan the flames of a Mac vs PC debate............

But what has been, & is, important for me is that the hardware I purchase works as effortlessly as possible: I do not have the knowledge, skills, or inclination to build a machine from component parts with the headache of compatibility, inter-operability, drivers, etc., not to mention issues of warranty et al. Thus, currently, Macs offer the best solution for me - with the added reassurance that the OS & hardware are engineered to work together optimally. PCs of a similar specification to their corresponding Macs are no longer ( to my understanding) significantly, if at all, cheaper (excluding self-build for the reasons cited above).

As we know & lament, e-on do not yet provide a 64bit version of Vue for the Mac: Thus, if you wish to benefit from significant amounts of RAM the options would appear to be...

1. Choose a PC running a 64bit Microsoft OS
2. Choose a Mac & run Vue on an MS OS via Bootcamp (with the hassle of saving to an external drive for file exchange between OSs)
   3) Choose a Mac & run Vue on an MS OS via Fusion or Parallels allowing both OSs to run side by side with seamless transfer of files (my undertanding from the promotional literature).
3. Choose a Mac & see if the soon to be released 'Snow Leopard' version of Mac OSX provides the promised framework for easy programming in multi-threaded 64bit (& e-on take advantage of it) !

Spoilt for choice really!   ☺

As I said, you can check my profile and see I am a professional and don't care what someone decides to use because it's their money. But speaking from a purely Computer Science education background, the Mac Pro is truly the way to go. Apple has a great reputation for their "Apple Care" service and as I said before, their OS has a better kernal than Windows. Also, you can do just like you stated and use Boot Camp to install Windows, Linux or whatever if you want.

In terms of Vue and 64bit on the Mac, I am hoping Vue 8 will address that. However, it's more of having the programming talent in place and the resources to do it because there is no reason it can't be done right now to a certain degree. After all, Modo and C4D both take advantage of the hardware better. It just amounts to getting a team in place to code it, but you are right in that it MAY be somewhat better to do once 10.6 Snow Leopard is out and do it all then.

One word of advice though, do NOT even attempt to do anything major inside an emulator like VMWare Fusion under Windows. The performance hit is VERY large and anything like 3D applications really must be run native using Boot Camp.

Happy shopping and rendering.

Jeff

Development on: Mac Pro 2008, Duel-Boot OS - Snow Leopard 10.6.6 & Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit, 2 x 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon , 10GB 800 MHz DDR2 RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 8800GT.