anyone having the same problem with the supposed dof indicator boxes in camera angle?

I mean those 2 planes that are supposed to show you the in-focus area.
They just don't make any sense. Either they show just in front of camera far away from focuspoint or if you raise blur amount enought they just show you deeper in-focus area and eventually even cover the focuspoint too.

And when you increase blur enough they sort of place themselves seemingly correct in front and back of the focus point. but blur of >100% if kinda ridiculous.

Though it's not just this update. They weren't working before either.

would be my quess too. Took me quite long to figure it out by myself when I had similar artifacts and it was the re-use indirect light option.

-4C is t-shirt weather!

-20 to -25C here at the moment depending on time of day. Climate warming where are you!

The new usb standard, faster than usb 2.
Not that much of interest (to me atleast) unless you're a heavy user of external usb drives.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Serial_Bus

might as well ask myself if anyone has knowledge how well the new radeons work with vue8?

Was considering getting the HD5850 as it's faster, cheaper, less power hungry and has opengl3.2 and dx11 support compared to nvidia GTX285.

I don't think you can find a new processor without support for 64bit operating systems these days.

True. I missed that. Thanks for correcting

I have to clarify the thread title a bit.

"i5 series quad processor"

i5 processors have 2 cores, except for the 2 lowest end models they all support hyperthreading thus able to run 4 threads, but they are NOT quad core prosessors as i7 are.

Hyperthreading seen by operating system as 4 (i5)  or 8 (i7) (virtual)cores is not equal to having 4 or 8 real physical cores.

i5 and i7 both have 4 physical cores.

i7 has hyper threading allowing it to allocate 2 execute threads per core thus windows sees it as 8 cores. It still has only 4 physical cores.

Hyper threading gives you extra performance depending on type of operations used with allowing the core use idle cycles with another (the second) execute thread.

However this does not give you twice the computing power compared to non-hyperthreading processor as it just tries to optimize the usage of those 4 cores with extra threads.
As normally you're wasting clockcycles to non-cpu operations and the extra threads are supposed to be utilizing these cycles.

How much extra it'll give is hard to say. depends so much on the operations run.
My wild guess is average of 20-25% more than similar architecture and clockspeed non-hyperthreading processor. You'll get some figures by seaching for i7 reviews.

you can find in http://stefan-morrell.com/ under downloads

You didn't say if you were running on 32 or 64 bit OS.

8Gigs won't help out if you're on 32bit OS

Quote - Someone mentioned an article here somewhere showing how to achive some of the Avatar Pandora like landscapes.. I wish something like that was available online...

There was one article or tutorial in 3d world
www.3dworldmag.com/page/3dworld

Doing it in photoshop is not only faster, but you can also adjust the dof before deciding how strong you want it to be without rendering the whole image again. So you have more control over it.

I've been pondering if dofpro is worth the bucks. anyone have experience with it?

Also if you're using standard analog VGA cable to connect your LCD monitor you should run calibrate/sync (or what ever it is called in your monitor) so your monitor syncs the image correctly to the screen.

When using DVI cable signal is digital and there is no need to sync/adjust the monitor to the signal

I had sluggish response with smooth shaded previews with my GF8800GT.
Settings views to flat shaded helped a lot with large detailed scenes.

You can try dropping the setting for opengl from settings down from shader 4 too.

[edit]
just tested some more. 
I get rid of the sluggishness by dropping the opengl settings in options.
From opengl 2.1 (shader 4) -> opengl (fixed hardware pipeline)
[/edit]