Yes Fast&Fur is a plugin which came out just before Maxon released Cinemas' Hair module.
At the time, using earlier versions of Maxwell, it was necessary to make the object editable for texture effects to render. The newer Maxwell's are able to convert Cinemas' basic noise effects.
The example shown was rendered a short time ago with Maxwell 1.6.
The Fast&Fur object did not have to be made editable in Cinema - Maxwell automatically converted it to Polygons (just over 2 million of them). So while the Cinema file size is kept relatively small at 0.1MB the mxs is 211MB.
It rendered but until Maxwell can render splines and point clouds without having to generate millions of polygons then I don't consider Maxwell very useful for this sort of work.
