CPU Rendering speed improvements 2.69 vs 2.71

#1

I’ve just migrated from using 2.69a official to 2.71 official. I completely missed the whole 2.70 release because I was in the middle of a long project.

Just curious, if you had to take a guess, what kind of CPU render time improvements were there between 2.69 and the current 2.71 on larger scenes.?

I realize there probably are a lot of factors that come into play, but if I’m not using smoke, volumes, hair, or sss in a 2.69 project… what type of speed improvements might I expect to see rendering the same project in 2.71.

#2

Hi, I think a lot. :yes:

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Ref/Release_Notes/2.70/Cycles#CPU_Performance

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Ref/Release_Notes/2.71/Cycles#Optimizations

Cheers, mib

#3

Thanks for the links mib2berlin, looking forward to enjoying some of these new CPU Performance and optimizations.

#4

The transparent shadow optimization is a huge one. The branched path ‘sample all lights on indirect bounces’ is also a potential time saver in some scenes. It makes the rendering itself go a lot slower, but the image cleans up much faster. Between these two features I was able to cut over 50% off my render times for one scene that was too large to fit in my GPU memory and also used SSS, so I had no choice but to use CPU rendering.