Well I will get yelled at by Bryce 5 diehards I am sure ;-) ... but here is how I see it : Bryce 5 has a lot of great ideas and additions .. very few of which are practical.. in my experience anyway .. First off I am on a AMD Processor 1.2 with 512 of ram and Windows ME operating system. The tree lab has possibilities I think but have not dug in too deep so I will reframe from commenting on this feature . Same with the meatballs. (love that name ;-) The new light lab I find has great options .. almost none of which I can apply with out turning a render into a week long marathon .. the soft shadows add so much render time onto my image that as nice as this feature would be it is totally impractical. The new render options? Again great ideas but the additional render times make the new features useless to me. Perhaps a gutsier putter would allow me to use these new features with more ease.. BUT I bought what I could afford at the time (last Aug).. my putter may not be the fastest on the block but I think it is about middle of the road and more or less the equivalent of what most folks have . Add onto this my files corrupting along with the program crashing at the most inopportune moments and I am not a happy camper. Mind you might get a rosier report from someone who had not just lost 3 days worth of work ;-).