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Software > Renderers

Blender Guru’s renderer comparison

Jul 09, 2021 by CGPress Staff
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Blender Guru has published a video comparing the main render engines including Cycles, V-Ray, Redshift, Luxcore, Arnold, Corona, Octane, E-Cycles and Cycles X. Although many similar “vs” videos exist, this one seems to have been quite thoroughly researched and is well worth a look. Watch it on YouTube and see a spreadsheet of results on Google Sheet. 

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22 Comments
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Guest (the fake)
3 years ago

Its good to see a speed comparison but it doesnt mean its production ready. Vray is on the good road to make a good gpu renderer but it take ages to be complete while others renderer are already fully production ready for many years now…

Juang3d
3 years ago

This test has many MANY problems, it’s flawed from the beginning, and a new improved version is on the works, with the collaboration of several persons experts in the different engines to improve results.

To put an example, just see the lightness of the different images, it’s clear that every render engine is computing a different amount of light, totally different.
comment image?width=1313&height=742

The positive side of this is that when criticism reached the author of the tests, BlenderBrit, part of the Andrew Price team, he was totally open to analyse and look for an improvement in testing method and to be as accurate as possible (and it’s VERY hard to be accurate)

rrer
Reply to  Juang3d
3 years ago

blunder faunboy like results not:D, ahahahaaa, fanatics:D

Juang3d
Reply to  rrer
3 years ago

What are you? a kid?

You notice that Cycles-X is considered the fastest one after Vray right in the all-rounded?

Also you noticed that Corona is way behind all the GPU render engines, including LuxCore (which is incorrectly tested here), right?

Why should I dislike the results?

I want the information to be as correct as possible, I don’t care if Cycles is defined as the slowest render engine of history or if LuxCore is considered garbage, what I want is to ensure that the information is as good as possible, it’s good for the users in general, and it’s good for the engines themselves to know where they are and what to improve.

Luckily the author of the tests is a serious person and nothing like you, he saw the feedback gave by different users and listened to it, showed true interest in improving this investigation and fixing any possible flaws that could have been detected in the process, and he is prepairing a second version, I will collaborate with him as other experts in different render engines to ensure the next study is more precise.

Render engines are a very complex matter, there is no bad render engine, they are all masterpieces, no matter if I personally consider an specific render engine useless for my workflow or not, in general they are math masterpieces that work incredibly well, and to evaluate them it’s a complex thing, specially if you don’t master every render engine.

MaurícioPC
Reply to  Juang3d
3 years ago

And yet he said he would pick Corona in terms of image quality/realism/easiness.

Juang3d
Reply to  MaurícioPC
3 years ago

Everyone has an opinion 🙂

IMHO in the comparison image the statue lighting is poorly treated where is the ceiling light effect?, the same as the sun light, where is the sun in the left part of the image? I mean… in the water…

Joachim Barrum
Reply to  Juang3d
3 years ago

I agree with you, the test was pretty inaccurate.
But I disagree with you saying corona is way behind all the GPU renders when it was tested on a 8 core cpu vs. a RTX 3090 beast for the GPU tests – the hardware was completely unfair. The RTX 3090 cost way more and consume WAY more energy than the Intel CPU it was tested on. If he used a Threadripper 3970x, the differences would have been a lot smaller and would have been more fair for CPU and GPU overall – That CPU cost about the same as the RTX 3090 and has 4x more cores than the Intel CPU it was tested on (so it would basically quadrupled the CPU results). And yet, the energy consumption would still be nearly half of what the 3090 uses. He forgot to factor that at all with this test.

Feynman
Reply to  Juang3d
3 years ago

Do you know if they will include Renderman (24) for the next round?

Technomancer
Reply to  Juang3d
3 years ago

its really hard to put render engines head to head but i always enjoy these comparisons.
it shows how relative “realism” can actually be. i have yet to watch the video but the sculpture centre left looks dodgy af in cycles. there has to be a shader mismatch. arnold looks tasty and well balanced.

btw dont mind these brats man.

Juang3d
Reply to  Technomancer
3 years ago

Usually I would ignore him, but I wanted to clarify in general that my comment is not out of hatred or not liking the results, but out of looking for proper testing and precision, no matter what my personal choice could be 🙂

Thanks for your support 🙂

Technomancer
Reply to  Juang3d
3 years ago

pretty clear the post was made in good faith. imo no need to waste any breath on the mouth breeders.

on topic – corona came out all guns blasting. havent used it since the rollout, might need to look into it again. any idea whats up with the centre sculpture in cycles? that cant look right can it?

Last edited 3 years ago by Technomancer
Juang3d
Reply to  Technomancer
3 years ago

Agree, there is something weird going on there, and probably also in the Corona scene, it’s not normal that the ceiling light don’t affect the statue either.

There some detailes that should have to be reviewed in the scenes as well, not just the settings

Technomancer
Reply to  Juang3d
3 years ago

yes. it seems the glass ist damn near opaque with cycles.

infact when i look a bit closer, the results are actually all over the place. lots of inconsistencies, curious.

AlexS
3 years ago

I don’t see Unreal in the list

Ludvík Koutný
Reply to  AlexS
3 years ago

It’s its own category, obviously. Realtime renderers still come with certain specific drawbacks, so it would just skew the comparison. It definitely would not help it.

AlexS
Reply to  Ludvík Koutný
3 years ago

Why? Final result is what matter. I consider Unreal for any Architecture work.

Juang3d
Reply to  AlexS
3 years ago

Because a real time render engine has some limitations, for example amount of bounces, precision of lighting, difficulty in configuration of shaders, etc…

The render engines analysed are from the “offline rendering” category, another category could be “online rendering” which is targeting real time.

You of course can use a real time render engine for final offline rendering, but it’s capabilities are different.

Anyways a test reaching the same result in UE5 / lumen vs offline render engines could be interesting 🙂

Ahmed Hindy
Reply to  AlexS
3 years ago

Unreal and EEVEE wont render volumes as near as path tracers

Polysquirrel
3 years ago

It’s unlikely anybody is going to have experience of all 9 render engines. So unless you give the test scene(s) to an expert for each to setup for optimum performance and then allow that scene to be downloaded to check the results are achievable then the scores will always be questioned. Competition and choice is good for the industry and so are comparisons like these without bias.

Juang3d
Reply to  Polysquirrel
3 years ago

Keep in mind that it’s not about optimizing the sncene for speed, but just using the engines correctly, but yes, experts are required 🙂

franx
Reply to  Polysquirrel
3 years ago

never mind, read that wrong…

Last edited 3 years ago by franx
DavidZ
3 years ago

Obviously this is a limited test, but interesting and pretty fair how they treat noise and settings across different engines. I would not minimize the importance of these types of videos as they are very rare and they provide important information to understand render software in general. For instance, as Juan3d pointed out, none of them are bad. (Perhaps LuXcore. Never heard of it before.) Also Blender renders are impressive in that, together with Vray, they have CPU and GPU support. Can anyone tell me if they allow for hybrid rendering? Because that statistic I missed. Using the power of CPU and GPU together is great.

One thing to comment on is when Vray 5 came along people where criticizing ChaosGroup for being complacent, but even in this limited test it is clear Vray is the overall best. I mean, how is it possible that its beats Redshift in the All-rounder GPU rendering alone? That’s not even adding the CPU. On top of that its got every feature support out there and the Frame buffer in 3ds max is ground breaking good. There is no contest IMHO.

Also Corona looks best with caustics enabled. Should have been included in the test. Would have made a huge difference.

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