The Render Time for one of my 2.49 files is 38.99 seconds.
The Render Time for the same file when opened and rendered in Alpha O is 1:27.84 minutes. The Render Settings in both versions all seem to be the same. Does this sound normal? I expected Alpha O to render at least a little faster than 2.49. Does this mean I should create in 2.5 then render in 2.49?
the raytracer of 2.50 should be faster in pretty much 99.9% of the cases, is it possible for you to post your .blend file so other people can take a look and if possible fix it ?
Here’s the results I get from using the test.blend from the Blender benchmark site.
Blender 2.49b - 46.34 seconds
Blender 2.50 Alpha 0 - 16.40 seconds
That’s a huge improvement (at least for that file.)
Have you tried other files to see if the trend is true with other types of files? Try the test.blend file here: http://eofw.org/bench/
The enhancement in render speed of 2.5 probably only is with scenes with raytraced mirror materials. If you use the “faked specular” instead of real raytraced reflections and such, then 2.5 will be slower than 2.49.
I have animated a very metal intensive scene with much mirror and transparency (for inside look) in 2.49b and one frame needs 2 hours and 13 minutes with my 3GHz quad core Mac Pro. With 2.5 it takes only 10 minutes, so I don’t have to tweak all around and break down the scene to reach the quality I need. This is incredible.
I have not rendered other scenes at the moment, so I can’t say anything about none raytraced scenes.