I ask because I saw this press release from Redshift showing how quickly they are moving.
As a 3d noob who wants to make small projects myself as quickly as possible - a really fast fully featured biased render engine really appeals to me. It is concerning that the attitude I’ve seen from Blender developers on making a biased super fast implementation of Cycles is very little AFAIK.
Does anyone with more experience have any thoughts on the matter?
Hi, hard to compare because you cant run Redshift from/in Blender, you need Max, Maya or Houdini.
You can make Cycles more biased in many ways, switch of caustics for example.
I would spend 500$ in a good GPU and start render, if your budged is 1000$ buy two instead of Redshift and one. 
Cheers, mib
No concern. Pick as you’re able and master your choices well.
Instant, faster renders do not insure better quality, more often the opposite occurs.
It’s not like deadlines will be postponed or clients satisfied faster, easier.
The sooner job gets finished, more is added, consequently done along being valued less and less… so you get to the point where there’s really no essence left…
- took the blue pill, work done -
Veni, veni… Veni!
Vidi…
as i see, what eyes see…
the feelings experienced
anticipated orgasms
all far - all gone
… and fat?
isn’t burnt anymore
the vacuum expands,
the void gets more hollow
in mind is the gap
for mind is the trap
reminiscent remnant remains
invisible cat
is or is not
yet a bitter of thought
still hard is to swallow
Vici, vici… vix.
Redshift’s new materials look really nice, but then I see the darkening issues that were recently crushed in Cycles due to a new shading model (especially in the glass material).
Their decoupling idea for IOR and roughness however looks interesting (perhaps to circumvent the energy loss issue for frosted glass), I don’t think I’ve seen that in a render engine.
I will also note, that because of the biased nature of the engine, it will likely mean having to deal with legacy illumination problems like light leaks and resolution issues (make sure you have thick walls) as well as the forest of settings that biased engines were well known for.
Thanks much for the responses - I was also schooled a bit on a reddit Blender thread. I really love working with Cycles thus far so I was just a bit afraid it would be fundamentally surpassed. Turns out it is a bit of an apples and oranges comparison. I am not at all trying to make my way through a forest of biased render options to make things look right.
Maybe I WILL snag another graphics card instead huehue. The other alarming thing is the performance of my graphics card (980ti) in Win 10 - I’ll be creating a Linux boot drive ASAP to get what look like a 3x performance increase. Wtf!!!