Does Bryce 5.0 render any faster than it's predecessors? I am particularly interested in information about the Mac version running under OS X. Is the application stable? Is it worth upgrading?
I would appreciate any information on this.
Thanks.

Well, on the first question, short answer yes, long answer no. I think it does actually render faster, but you'll probably never use the quicker render speeds as you can now crank the renderer up to high heaven. as far as I've heard bryce works better on mac than pc, since apparently it was designed for mac... It's very stable, infact I don't think I've ever had it crash without a good and easy explanation, and tho alot will disagree, yes I think its worth upgrading, hope that helps

<< Is it worth upgrading? >> IMO yes, the new features are well worth the money. I'm on a PC, and find it very stable.

If you are on a MAC and running OS X.1
bryce is well worth the upgrade because
you can start up a really long render
and send bryce to the background where it will churn away in its own protected memory space without holding your computer hostage so you can work on other things.

Thanks I think I am going to start saving money for my upgrade then.
wolf359: Dose it hamper on performance a lot or is the computer still kind of snappy? I am sure some kind of degradation should be expected, specially since I don't have a DP machine.

I'm running on a G4/466 and I run all of my renders at 1600x1200 on a 1:1 ratio and performance is really snappy. Reliability under OSX 10.1.2 is phenomenal and you'll love that you can run a render and switch out to do a thousand other things. The only advice I have is to run tons of RAM since if OSX starts to page to the vm swapfile, things can get kinda ugly. I run 1.1 Gig in my machine and it's plenty quick although a DP 800 would be nice! But yes, it's more than worth it!

I didn't think so at first. I wasn't going to get it, but a very generous friend bought copies of Bryce 5 for both my sister and me. Not sure why he did this, but I soon found out that it is well worth it. He's a really nice guy to do this. He tried Bryce and played with it for a while, but never had time to do it, but he knew my sister and I both use it and he bought upgrades for both of us. What a guy! I LOVE the tree generator! And the textures seem more vivid to me (maybe it's only my imagination). Yes, do upgrade. You won't regret it. Melanie