Alright, so I did the tests and I am actually quite surprised with the results. I compared Cycles in latest August 02 Master to Corona V2. Both pure Path tracing, with ray depth limit of 12, and max ray intensity of 10 (ray clamping). Identical scenario, identical camera, identical material. And to my surprise, Cycles on CPU only was actually equally as fast as Corona.
I am not sure what attributed to such a difference in my previous tests. Granted, they were done over a year ago, and I may have done a mistake, but I suspect that the better tile size handling may have something to do with it, because I was not aware about tile size impact on performance back when I was doing those tests, and in latest master, it’s handled automatically.
Non the less:
Cycles, 5m 32s
Corona, 5m:
Very comparable results, very comparable times.
Now I did one more test, with Corona and secondary cached GI:
This one is default and used for every scene pretty much, even animated ones. It’s about twice as clear as those pure path traced renders in one 5th of the time, while also being more accurate since the secondary GI bounces are not limited to 12, which attributes to some light energy loss. So in practical scenarios, especially interior ones, cached methods are superior.
Non the less, I still stand corrected. If we compare pure path tracing performance, it’s apparent that Cycles, at least the one in latest master, is equally as performant as Corona (or V-Ray) for that matter. So really great job on that. I guess I underestimated Cycles quite a bit.
Renderstamp from Corona shows rays/s. In Cycles, I still don’t know how to obtain that value.