Cycles X vs Cycles, does it really live up to the hype?
3d illusions writes:
Cycles vs Cycles X.
Viewport performance and final render speed test between the two different flavours of the Cycles render engine.
Can Cycles X really live up to all the hype?!
Cycles X is not even done yet, comparison videos like these aren’t pointless at this early stage.
You haven’t scratched the surface, and I admit to a GTX 1070, too. In CyclesX, I got more than half the render time on one of my scenes. But that’s not the whole story. At the moment, Cycles-X does not support multi-device rendering. Here’s the rub, I have dual GTX1070 for rendering, and cycles-X more than halved the time on my render time on on a single GTX1070, than Cycles Classic managed with both GPUs.
As “Two Minute Papers” would say, what a time to be alive.
That’s odd, I wonder if perhaps your scene is too large for VRAM, and it’s going out of core? It could be that out of core only works on one GPU, so in actual fact you’re rendering on one GPU in cycles and cycles X. I’m just guessing at this.
But yes, hold onto your papers! :D
No, the scene is within VRAM limits, and in any event, there is no sharing of VRAM in either classic nor (I expect) Cycles-X. It has to fit within the 8GB that the GTX1070 has, regardless of how many you have.
I should add that, it’s that one scene that does it, but it has complex shaders and lighting. Other tests are less impressive (but impressive nevertheless), and I have one scene where there is barely any discernible difference.
Even so, aggregate result is a moderate to impressive improvement.
Out of core rendering has been available since the last few 2.79 daily builds. It only works with Nvidia though. AMD supposedly has out of core, but it’s handled buy the AMD driver rather than by Blender.
Yes, more complex scenes definitely benefit the most in Cycles X.
I’m looking forward to the render setting’s transparent glass option to become compatible with Cycles X. I’d switch to it now if that was working.
I’m hoping for volumetrics and shadow catcher to make a comeback.
If you want (and I say this candidly) the scene with the most improvement is one of those “for ever and will never be finished” scenes, that I use advances, learned techniques etc. to constantly tweak, but as long as you never make the scene itself available publicly (there are some messes in there during it’s 5 – 6 year journey) I could let you have a copy to test yourself.
If you do want, I’m happy for you to share the results and renders – just not the .blend.
Thanks. I’m up to my neck in work at the moment, but I might give you a shout once things quieten down.
No problem. It was more of a demonstrative offer than anything. :)
If cycles is updated – I would love to see the implementation render proxies! It’s standard in every other render engine and helps with massinstancing, generally heavy scenes etc.
Hype? I don’t care about whether the hype is justified or not! Blender does not have to justify itself, since it’s given away free and does not have to honour any expectations of ability. If the devs could make Cycles just 10% faster, then I’d be very happy – and the X development is not finished yet. Apple and Adobe do hype, which is never justified by the pitiful improvements, lack of development, or the greedy prices. Those are the sort of products where a statement such as “Does it live up to the hype” are valid.
I was just adding a bit of a build up. I’m a blender source code developer myself in fact :)