Render engines speed comparison - a new perspective

Andrew Price did an amazing job with that video. He even mentioned that he had to resort to the default settings for all renderers because of how fucking long it would take to figure them all out and how to then make a fair comparison and the fact that if he had to optimise the renderers by tweaking settings, he'd have to sit and spend months doing that for each renderer for every new scene he makes since not every setting is optimal during all circumstances.

I think the default settings show how fast an engine is out of the box. Sure, I can make cycles 999x faster by tweaking some settings which would r*pe every other render engine in the world in terms of speed, quality, denoise performance, colours and everything like that.

I'd like to see you make your own comparison, but you now have to optimise every engine for every new scene and then tell us. Now you have to really git gud with every renderer, seeing how there are MANY people who are infinitely better than you at optimising, so your optimising of the renderer will be picked on thus making your version of Andrew's video void and null. Now you have to start over and get it right, again.

A material library has nothing to do with a renderer. It might be a bonus gift to a renderer but is in no way coupled to a render engine and therefore the "materials" argument doesn't count imho. And speed makes 80% of the render engine when you render animations. Cause 15min at 30 fps need over 20000 frames and I really don't buy time on a render farm and want to render that thing over night on my PC. Would I accept a 2 hour rendertime if the quality of the images would be superiour? The quality cannot be superiour enough so that I would tolerate 2h of rendertime. I what spheres are you living that a 2 hour rendertime per frame is acceptable time? WHAT THE HELL? I kick every renderengine from my PC that is not capable to render an animation frame with acceptable quality in max. 30 seconds (incl. denoising). WTF ARE YOU EVEN TALKING ABOUT? The Rendertime PER frame at PIXAR for example lies between 3 and 5 minutes!!! For Toy Story 1 Pixar accepted NO rendertime above 3min per Frame.

Thanks for the video man, touched on topics that are often overlooked, a wealth of knowledge here.

I'm currently using Blender for a project and it certainly has a default 'look' to it (flat log/materials never look rough enough). Been using my Davinci experience to add a lot of subtle lens and camera defect effects in the compositor, helps to freshen up the renders.

Biggest issue on the project is trying to implement fog volumes, as Cycles slows down to a crawl, and even after all the waiting the fog is noisy but then looks terrible if denoised in a regular way. Have had a lot of success after learning about render layers. My work around is I actually render the fog in Evee and then layer it in later on, there's more control this way too over it's opacity. Only issue is that reflective materials in Cycles don't show any fog in them, so current challenge is to find a fast workaround for this one drawback.

I just wished when I stated learning 3D stuff that the importance of a good final rendering pipeline had come up sooner, I have so many projects with love poured into them that I never had time to render out xD

Nice touch with David Attenbot. It added gravitas.

If you try to test all the render engines by your own, which settings will you turn on and which off.

Whatever setting you play with there will be a comment saying "you should toggle this setting" and "you shouldn't toggle these settings".

Why don't you try it by making a render engine comparison video on your own.

Cycles don't trade quality for performance by default. Yes, there are 1-2 settings for if you prefer performance but not on by default. And through a great community we can get both quality settings and performance settings and that depends upon what you need.
It is open for all, both quality lovers and speed lovers.

@blenderguru did a great job on that video. It's not an easy task comparing renderers that use different algorithms and settings to achieve identical results. With enough tweaking, any good artist can get the desired look. You sometimes can't even tell the difference between Arnold vs Octane vs Vray renders especially in animation/Vfx where motion blur is a MUST.
Speed is essential in production and I don't subscribe to reducing image quality just to have faster renders. So if A can help me achieve the same results as B with significantly less time, why not?
I love Arnold but you mostly have no option than to keep increasing the samples (at the expense of render speed); where as Vray provides the flexibility of working around some of these things. I switched from Arnold to Vray because I'm able to achieve things faster with it. And in my opinion, Vray is currently more than just a renderer.
Great video by the way.

I agree with the video, but speed is factor number 1. No one will waste your time and 99% you are doing for ordinary people who spend 2 seconds on the picture with their eyes. It's a business. I will also add that you have to pay for the render

Even a power drill has to be changed from its default settings for common tasks, and they usually only have a trigger, a switch and a dial. Controls take time and work to add to anything, and are only added if users can benefit from manipulating them.

I don't think every render engine has its own way to render, that's not true. At the core almost all path tracers use the same quadratic equations and same trigonometry to render. Optimization on the other hand, that's where different companies have used different tricks to speed up and optimize their render engines. I don't think Cycles has any look for example, the grayish look you get from the filmic color space, if you use ACES or the new color space AGX which was also made by the guy who made filmic then your renders will start to look different. The guy who made cycles used to work for Arnold (solid angle) before Autodesk bought it so he knows them both. And no, speed also matters because of deadlines and turn overs, maybe if you are doing things on your own but speed is very important as well in production because it cost a lot more to render for hours where VFX companies are all about saving money. Octane is made for ease of use and it's great but it lacks the flexibility needed for professional VFX production, it also has a very polished look after rendering which is not always preferred before compositing, if the renders look flat in ACES that's always better in VFX production than rendering with glows and blooms built in. But Octane crashes too much with big scenes and out of core rendering is horrible and it struggles very badly with FOG other than that it's a good render engine that barely fixes the bugs and shows the same tech demo for years in their presentation lol.

Real time render is the way to go! And if you want to go free from subscriptions…Unreal+Blender is the perfect combo!

Actually you are 100% correct in this one.

Thank you! I did think his video was a bit simple and was disappointed by it so thank you for breaking it down.

U are right luxcore behaviour to the light it so amazing i ve never seen like it but slowow

Blender + Redshift would be my personal Hero

used octane, cycles and some vray - I always wanted to learn proper vray, it was so damn difficult to get the right settings, I gave up many times and it felt slow (therefore slow to learn), as as octane hit beta I had my first renders I was proud of, the fact that each slight change I did was instatly rendered and fedback in real time made it 1000 times faster to learn.. in the end I felt that some interior scens seemed they could be rendered faster with heavily optimized vray - but I stuck to octane because I could iterate quickly - open scenes - (not interiors) in octane were blazing fast, and feedback was awesome, my workflow was to simply have octane open all the time while I actually built the scene, it gave me a totally new perspective when doing any 3d as I could decide on the fly what I wanted to do - just modeling out stuff and hitting render seemed so slow and I can't go back on a render engine that just works like that .. I'm hooked on interactive rendering, it makes decision making faster ..
In the end I did realize you could probably do interiors faster, again went back to vray, and no.. it's damn to complex, and I couldn't get hooked on that ..
Then I switched to blender (from max/octane).. and from version 2.8 cycles felt very similar to octane, but twice as slow - but eeve was amazing, I was hooked on eeve - and with cycles x / blender 3.0 i guess - cycles finally felt like it was getting as close as possible to octane speeds - and yeah it's native to blender and I think it's much better since octane implementation in max is never going to feel like native - or like vray (vray is almost native to 3dmax, everyone supports it, octane took a decade to get as close as possible and still fails with a lot of plugins), where cycles works with anything that works natively in blender - and honestly, the look - depends on your skills - I had people claiming I did renders in 3dsmax while it was in blender.. after you've gone pro, it doesn't matter, you know the look you like and that's what you're gonna get..
Some things are faster or more convenient in octane, some are in cycles.. I prefer cycles now as it's ease of use and interactivity became almost same as using eeve - and it's compatible with everything blender - if they made octane work in blender natively I'd probably switch in a second..

.. the video doesn't say much at the end - try stuff out, see what you like - use that, the best tool is the one you are productive in
(that said - octane at default settings isn't at it's fastest, I've learned how to optimize it and get 2x speed up every time, with exact same looks, and it's like 3 settings, they should change those defaults - there's almost the same settings in cycles, but they don't feel to speed up that much, still, similar applies, number of bounced etc will affect the render speeds)

Bro, the intro "He's crazy" I lost it. That's so good hahah

I used most of these render engines all of it are good but if you want supreme overall quality I recommend Arnold and RenderMan specially if you have renderfarm or powerful workstation, But If you are independent artist it doesn't really matter just pick the one you're comfortable with like the ones that favor speed, V-Ray, Corona or Octane, Redshift etc . . .

Must give this a like for the intro