Virgilio Vasconcelos has recently compared the render speed of the current version of Blender (2.49) with the latest 2.5 build (svn revision 23930). The render optimizations are thanks to Jaguarandi and his Google summer of code 2009 project. The results are very impressive!
Virgilio writes:
After I saw the news that the rendering optimizations made by the user known as Jaguarandi were merged into the trunk branch of Blender 2.5, I decided to make a little experiment:
Using the file provided by the well known Blender Render Benchmark, I've compared the rendering speeds of the current 2.49b and 2.5 (svn revision 23930). Obviously the speed of two instances of Blender rendering the same scene while recording it in HD resolution isn't the most ideal environment. But still, blender 2.5 was able to render the scene twice before 2.49b could finish the first one.
In normal conditions (without resource hungry processes in parallel), the render time using version 2.49b was 01m03s, while 2.50 finished it in amazing 25s! :)
This new Blender is getting more exciting each day. I would like to thank and give my kudos to all the developers!
Check out the blog page for more information and the demonstration video. More information on Jaguarandi's optimization(s) can be found here.
42 Comments
Epic Win.
also the game engine seems two times faster
it's amazing!!! it is really fast!!
awesome-o...think of all the time one saves,
the render improvements are really major and therefor will boost the whole communties possibilities when it comes to rendering,
I really bow before anyone that helped Jaguarandi and his GSOC project!!!
Cool video comparison, really nice music!
Viewing this I felt fine ;)
Same result here on 4 CPU Windows Vista 64. Good news.
Just tried on a scene that use a lot of raytracing (test-tubes + support) and the render results are :
2.5 : 6 min 40
2.49 : 21 min 00
So it's realy faster with raytracing.
This is truely awesome.
Can someone compile a 64 bit windows version of this 23930 or newer. Graphicall didn't seem to have one. I have sabayon linux on live cd... Until I get one more hard-drive, it stays that way. But I want to compare between linux, vista and windows 7 (when I get one of those that is)...
I agree with others that recording a hires video at the same time as you render thise isn't really much of a test.
So I just want to do some tests with this too... I could use some more speed with fur since I kinda need speed on that area. And if it's really that much more faster in all raytraced hard surfaced things... :D
I'm more and more excited about 2.5 now. Thank you Jaguarandi and all involved with this.
However, on a scene with hair, i did not see a amazing speedup. It's the same time for me.
Well one of those cores (probably the one that the old Blender is on) is also running the system and the recording program.
Also I think in Ubuntu when you have a certain window selected I think it sets that one on priority. Thus unfair advantage for 2.5. These races should be held separately with the same conditions on each.
I look forward to 2.5.
I hope that 64 bit versions that are compatable with linux and windows 7 are quickly available.
I look forward to the official release.
2.49b 2:42.97
2.5 1:07.95
3x faster! :)
2.5
With 8 threads and 8 tiles 0:12.74
More than 4X faster on my E6850!
Very impressive! Thank you so much Jaguarandi!
2.5 aint coming fast enough but hey, you want quality you wait for it
with the EOFW file i get:
2.49 : 01:40:34
2.5 : 00:43:10
BUT if you put 9 suzanne monkey in a scene, subdivided at 4 and put a 0.8 reflective material on them, i get :
2.49 : 00:43:93
2.5 : 00:55:02
(here is the file http://www.skol.ch/o/9suzanne.blend ) you can test and tell here if u get also slower results?
so 2.5 is slower in this particular case, it seems that the raytree building is taking too much time.
I tried on different other scenes and in most normal situations 2.5 seems faster though.
Amazing!!
That's really interessent for my short animation that's making 5hrs for a 2 seconds animation with the 2.49b :/
I guess I'll wait for the 2.5 to finish my animation rendering :D
Using SVN 23890 (from here: http://www.graphicall.org/builds/builds/showbuild.php?action=show&id=877)
I get these results with the 9suzanne.blend file:
2.49: 00:21.93
2.5: 00:49.05
Strange, in this case it takes almost twice as long. It seems to hang on "Raytree... building", which I will assume is an optimization in most cases.
With the EOFW file:
2.49: 00:51.31
2.5: 00:25.46
I'm using an Intel Core 2 Quad (4 threads) at 2.60ghz and a GeForce 9800 GT.
@oenvoyage:
I tested blender with your "9-monkey-scene" and got:
1:02.24 for 2.49b and
1:26.14 for 2.5 (built a few hours ago)
So for this scene 2.5 is really slower than 2.49b, because the raytree in 2.5 takes *very* long to build. But the render itself is much faster in 2.5 than in 2.49b.
Viewports are faster too.
try using instancing for speedup of duplicate objects?
Relic...rendering..
Really! That is very sweet. Not tried it yet. I don't like building stuff.
I have the feeling that the quality of renders has been going up with the diferent version of blender.
but the speed of rendering has also been going down with each update. like there is more stuff boging it down.
I would seriosly like to see some of this cleaned out during 2.5
That's pretty amazing.
You don't need to compare 2.49b and 2.5, really, just compare 2.5 with auto acceleration vs 2.5 with 'octree' acceleration to see the speedup. But 2.49b vs. 2.50 sounds better. :) Instances is really great, but you need linked duplicates, I believe, or arrays or particles, etc...
I got 1:10 with 2.49b or 2.5 octree, and 0:32 with 2.5 auto. (and 0:30 with instances, for some reason, don't think there are duplicates in test.blend...)
You need to turn on VBOs in user prefs, then the viewport really flies! (Another SoC project) Amazing, maybe more important than the raytracer in some ways... Even though the raytracer speedup is great!!!
Sounds great. Can't wait for 2.5! Optimizations are always welcomed.
Impressive indeed. And with SSE2/3/4 optimizations, that time would be even shorter. :)
Nice and thanks!
Just think of the amount of energy that this will save. ;-)
Great job!
from ranking 903 to 312, not bad...:)
how can i enable the sse2 optimization? in the user-config.py there isnt a trace...:(
or build scripts automatically adjust the optimization flags?
TIA
done! :) from 34.98 seconds to 24.84 with sse3 and 3 threads, the sculpting is more faster too...
YES!
wow...
Unbelievable, I was sceptic about that and yesterday I tried for the first time the version 2.5
Another level guys, I love it and it's a lot easier to learn than every other Blender version ever, rendering was 3 times faster with my scene (41.25 seconds with 2.5, 2 mins and 20 secs with 2.49b on a Mac Pro dual quad-core)
Yes, a littel bit faster!
15,9 s with 2.49b and with 2.5 it's 12,04 s!! (both 8 threads!)
But I am waiting for the finished 2.5 with GI and particle-rendering!!
@Lokimonster:
OKOK!! But with 8 tiles I get 10,13 seconds! What do you say now!!
Reading this I finally got a custom build from http://www.graphicall.org/builds and man, should I have done that earlier! Not only does the optimized version for my CPU render about 30% faster, it also comes with a great custom theme, a plethora of useful scripts, a material library and tons of other features. Using custom builds is the way to go!
I notice a thing in rendering a mirrored and transparented object with ray tracing enabled in rendering setting i see to say it to all , if it realy true ,
after rendering an animation , try to change the octree value in rendering settings , some times rendering faster when choosing higher value and sometimes faster when choosing lowest value . so i suggest when rendering try and press scape to try another value of octree to see your choice which will be faster , God bless all
i dont care much for speed. just give me a good quality render.
I tried it and my render time came down by more than half, which was great. What was not so great was seeing all you guys measuring your times in seconds when I'm still in multiple minutes on a 3GHz Pentium 4 (wipes a tear from the eye), still, I love my machine and 5m35s down to 2m30s is quite an improvement.
all those who use linux should try the kernel with the ZEN patchset, it will speed a lot everything and speed up twice blender !!