Quote - I suspect you don't have much experience with Vue renders.

 
No I don't. The only Vue experience I have is with Ozone, and the attempts I have made to try Vue 5 and 6.

Quote - Depending on scene and settings, if you use radiosity, you can set it up to not have to calculate radiosity for each render, thus saving considerable time. Also, spectral 2 clouds take longer to render than spectral clouds which take longer to render than 'regular' clouds. Different levels of anti-aliasing as well as other settings can affect render times significantly.

That makes sense.

Quote - Even so, if you use the five render licenses which come with Vue, and a typical frame renders in an hour, it will render in 12 minutes on your renderfarm. Not too bad.

Here we'll just have to disagree. Even rendering with very high settings in Max, a very long frame is 5 minutes (per frame) on the Dual Quads

I had read that using Mental Ray and Vue xStream was pretty good as far as render times, but the battle using xStream just wasn't worth it (I'll spare you all the re-hashed items).

My plan at this point is to wait for someone that already owns Vue and uses xStream, to install 7.5 and see if it is any better. Right now all I have is negative feed back (closer to RUN AWAY) from current users.

btw it is a bit of a diversionary tactic to compare to other poor performing software and claim "at least we aren't as bad as them".
If the feedback from 7.4 and 7.5 users (using xStream) is positive, I will likely buy Vue.
If it is not, then I highly doubt I will buy it.

David