I'm inviting everyone here to participate in a test to compare the Vue render speeds on their various computer systems. To do this, I'd like everyone to render a stock scene on their system and report the results as well as the specifics of your system (CPU type and speed, amount and type of RAM, Video card, Operating System, etc.) The scene I chose is Cactus Motel. I chose it because it has 5 lights, 153 objects and 2,348,318 polygons, which should give our systems a thorough workout. It also has a lot of busyness to the bit map and should push the antialiasing pretty hard. I chose 800x450 as the resolution because everyone here should be able to render to screen with at least 800x600 resolution. Any higher and some people may not be able to participate. I did 3 tests: Final Render to screen, Final Render to disk, and Ultra render to screen. Here are the results on my system: Final to screen - 13 minutes, 59 seconds. Final to disk - 13 minutes, 17 seconds. Ultra to screen - 1 hour, 8 minutes, 25 seconds. My system is a Dell Pentium III 1 GHz with 256 megs of PC133 SDRAM and an Nvidia TNT2 M64 with 32 megs of RAM, running on Windows ME. I was surprised that the render to disk was faster than the render to screen. On my old system, it was always much slower. For those of you who don't know how to load the "Cactus Motel" scene: From the "File" menu in Vue3, choose, "Open". Click on the Collection titled, "More Samples". Double click on the first scene in the first row. The scene should load. From the "Picture" menu, choose, "Render Options". Switch the Render quality to, "Final", the render destination to, "Screen" and the picture size and resolution to 800x450 for the first render. Click "OK" and allow the scene to render completely, including antialiasing. Make note of the total render time. Go back to picture options and check the "Render to disk" box. Render to whatever folder you wish, but make sure to file format is "BMP" (I don't know if compressed files take loner or not) Make sure the color depth is 16 million. Click "OK" and render. For the last render, uncheck the "Render to disk" box and switch the render quality to "Ultra" I'm going to try the scene this evening on my old PII 400 just to see how much speed I gained by upgrading. Should be interesting. I look forward to seeing your results. -SMT

I'd rather stay in my lane than lay in my stain!