Modifiers affecting render times?

I am wondering if having modifiers applied affect the render time (or more specifically, the time to calculate and prepare everything before rendering), when compared to having them enabled in the modifier stack?

Modifiers applied to mesh, versus modifiers which haven’t been applied.

yes they do… and that is normal.

Yes, modifiers have to be evaluated before render. A model that has subsurf applied will render faster than one with the modifier still active, rather, the renderer can skip the step of evaluating the modifier and freezing the mesh first since it is already done. Would I recommend this? Not really, but it some cases it can be beneficial.

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In BI, polygon count can have a significant effect on the rendertimes.

In Cycles, there would be little impact outside of the preparation stage (you can have objects contain millions of polygons and it will render at a similar speed as those with thousands, but it needs more time to load into RAM and get a BVH tree built).

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