In general, Vue renders bit slower then Carrara, but, output has more depth to it. Antialiasing, however, is more complicated than it should be, and sometimes it fails on lower settings.
Rendering has a different approach then Carrara, it is a farely advanced version of distributed ray tracing, first time seen in Bryce5, I believe. This tehnique produces far better soft shadows then one in Carrara, but it is time consuming (for those less patient, shadow maps are there).
In my opinion Vue handles high poly counts very well, it has nice LOD, it does polygon reduction if necessary and on render times processes full resolution mesh.
Lot of parameters to set here to adjust it to your hardware performance.
When it comes to instancing, Vue handles polys better then Carrara, I have scene with more then 4.2 trilions of them, and it renders rather quickly (with global ilumination turned on as well).
Down side of Vue instancing is that it still cannot distribute objects around entire sphere (automatically), for example, it kind of "projects" instances from above...
Trees in Vue could be better, with more controls and more different classes of plants, but overall, they look somewhat better to me then ones in Carrara.
Never used terrains in Carrara, cuz I usually do not do landscapes, but I had to in Vue. Procedural terrains (regular ones are there as well) in Vue are the absolute blast (hard to control, but still). They have basicly infinite amount of detail, and it varies depending of the distance from the camera. Above all that, displacement can be applied on them as well.
In general, Vue looks more mature as an application (I would not say PRO, becouse that is up to user IMO), LOT of features are refined and one feels there is nothing to add to them (SubSurfaceScattering, for example, it's more refined and capable in Vue's beta version, even unfinished, then one in Carrara5.1).
Well, there is something to add to it, and in fact that goes for every software out there: MORE SPEED...
That's it. I highly suggest downloading trial version, cuz only you can decide is it good for you or not. Cheers
