I think this viewport is a nice feature but I think is not so necessary (is nice, but really can't work without? Why people are so crazy about the viewport preview? A more strong, update mental ray integration is better IMO (don't know how is mental ray in this release) so we have a faster render region preview, or fully implemented Iray is not better?

I don't think we can judge it until we test it on a modern graphics card. Why they didn't use a better one for the demo is beyond me.

I think the fact that it handles procedurals is fantastic!

And also big news for me...

It FINALLY supports color management. That is a real PITA if you use linear workflow now.

Don't forget there were a LOT of calls for viewport improvement. I'll be excited to try this.

Crowd sim on the other hand is a mystery to me. I never saw anyone ask for that. What the??

there are limitations, but CGFX shaders do work on ATI

Good question, but shouldnt CgFX perform better since it's an nVidia library running on nVidia hardware? I mean, just like CUDA executes faster than OpenCL.

Good question and one I asked too. Maybe Luceric could explain it better.
Thing is though, we can't just copy/paste the code from Max/Maya into Soft so it uses the same viewport, It actually took a while for Maya to do VP2 and the first release was more about performance over quality. Then over the following versions, they've gradually increased the quality. But Maya's VP2 isn't really a day to day working mode...yet, but I'm sure it will be. Same for Soft's HQV, for me this is a v1.0, alot of work has gone into getting it working and now it can only get better.

Ultimately, the work we undertake is influenced by customers. I sat in several meetings with Chinny presenting the roadmaps and ideas of features, gauging the feedback so the teams could prioritise the work.

what about alembic support? is this dropped from 2013 release?

And the thing we really wanted was Crowd Simulation? Really? It does look impressive, but it's pretty niche isn't it? In 20 years of producing 3D animations, I've been asked to do this once!

Also, I notice that Softimage, Maya and Max have all been 'upgraded' to Mental Ray 3.10, but there is no mention of faster, better or improved anything! Is it just a bug-fix version?

on crowd simulation, that was my reaction as well, where did this come from, of all the lists and such, I never saw it pop up. I think most likely the people who have the voice are obviously not coming from these forums.

Sadly as far as character animation is concerned I don't think Modo is there yet but I really really like their moxy. Modos updates remind me of the early days of max/maya/softimage, where the updates where huge and interesting. The updates from Autodesk are what you get from a company that owns most of the market and know the majority of their userbase can't pick up and leave, and the ones that can... well they can live without those people.

maybe Maya and 3ds max people asked for it, so now they got Softimage to do it for them?

That comment would be funny is I didn't have a nagging suspicion that it's true!