These effects will greatly improve the realism of your renders, but will also make them considerably longer. While Bryce render times become ridiculously long as soon as you start using these effects, Vue seems to manage to keep render times reasonable. Also, one important thing is that Vue lets you adjust blurred reflections and refractions for each material independently. In Bryce, enabling blurry reflections will make all reflections in the scene blurry (you can control the amount of blur by using the specular halo color, the brightness of the color controling the amount of blur).

Vue renders that exhibit a lot of soft shadows and depth of field can sometimes appear grainy. Increasing render quality settings usually fixes this, but there are cases when the effects a too blurry and this won't be enough to get rid of all the grain. Of course, you can always render at a higher resolution and then down-sample. This will produce perfect results, but it's not what I'd call a satisfactory approach...

Bryce renders of strong depth of field and soft shadows are always impeccable if you boost quality – but that comes at the expense of a ridiculously long render time. Not overly satisfactory either...

One good point in Vue is that blurry effects will not slow down the quickie renders you make as you setup your scene. It has a way of faking the blurry effects by creating noisy preview renders that are extremely fast to render yet perfectly adequate for previewing the result.

Setting up a scene in Bryce that has blurry effects is painfully long...

That's an area where Vue really shines. While rendering times are quite similar in both apps when the scene is simple (Bryce may even have the edge on basic scenes), the difference becomes really noticeable as soon as the scene gets more complex. Vue's rendering speed remains fast, while Bryce tends to get quickly bogged down.

While fast rendering speed is not that important when producing the final picture, it is a definitive asset when you're elaborating the scene and you constantly need to check your work.

Bryce doesn't support multi-processor rendering.

Vue supports multi-processor rendering on the operating systems that are designed for it (Win NT4, 2000, XP Pro and OS X).

If you don't have two processors in your machine (or a hyperthreading enabled P4), you probably won't care much for multi-processor rendering. If you do, then this is invaluable, as it means that Vue will be rendering at twice the speed as with a single processor. Also, you should note that adding a second processor to a system is usually a very cost-effective solution to increasing the rendering speed of your computer.

Bryce supports rendering over a network of computers using Bryce Lightning. Using this system, Bryce will split the rendering into chunks and have each computer on your network do part of the work. So if you have 4 computers on your network, your pictures/animations will render 4 times faster! The beauty of it is that it also works for single, very large pictures.

Vue doesn't support any network rendering in itself, but if you get Mover 4, you can render animations across a network (but not single pictures).

Of course, if you don't have a network of computers at hand, this is not going to be of much value to you...

Both applications can produce the information required to post-process or composite your renders (mask render and distance render). In Bryce, you have to ask specifically for this information (meaning you have to render your scenes several times to get all the information) while in Vue this information is generated automatically and available simultaneously.

Again, both applications offer similar functionality, which is keyframe based animation. You can animate movement, size or rotation of objects within a scene, terrain shape, light color and intensity as well as materials. You can create complex hierarchical animations by creating relationships between objects, such as linking or tracking. You cannot however, animate the actual shape of the objects, as you would with a complete inverse kinematic and bones deformation engine. But that's not the focus of the programs.

On top of this form of "basic" animation, Vue offers "Dynamic Motion Reactions" which is a system that simplifies the setting up of a complex animation. For example, you can pick an object and tell it to move like an airplane. The object will then automatically bank as it turns. The system is pretty cool and does work very nicely. Of course, you can adjust the behavior of the object later. Similar results can obviously be achieved in Bryce, but you'll have to setup all the keyframes by hand, and start all over again if you modify the path of the object... Getting a vehicle to follow the surface of a terrain is going to require a tremendous amount of work, while in Vue, it's just a question of selecting the appropriate motion. This system can also be combined with Poser 4 character animations (if you have Mover 4), so that you can easily make a Poser dude walk all over a Vue terrain....

Motion blur is essential if you want to produce high quality animations. Sadly, there is still no such option in Bryce 5 (although animation has been in Bryce since version 3).

Vue handles motion blurring very nicely and also quite efficiently. Of course, motion blur will lengthen the rendering time of an animation quite significantly. But the results are incomparably better and well worth the wait.