True I forgot the denoiser. So E cycles denoiser is that much better than Intels?
*Also: *
*I am not interested into any flame wars of E vs K and so on. *
I am more genuinely curious about how things are now with the new Cycles version.
E-Cycles use OIDN and Optix but it use it very clever, no idea how, I donĀ“t have to care about.
Cheers, mib
Letās try to keep the focus on vanilla cycles-x here. There are threads on the other versionsā¦
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Well I ask specifically about Vanilla Cycles X here 
Blender 3 is really a fantastic update.
Geometry nodes push Blender a lot further towards generative design abilities
Cycles X brings a much needed speed improvement
And also Cycles got many new abilities like a better working shadow catcher lights groups (soon I think)
This was not just a small update !
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and caustics finallyā¦
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The above scene I tested in both K-Cycles and E-Cycles (Blender 3 releases). I did not change any settings, and just hit F12 to render.
Regular Cycles-X: 56:00 seconds, 5921.86 MB memory use
E-Cycles-X: 57:85 seconds, 6586.78 MB memory use
K-Cycles-X: 56:02 seconds, 7016.85 MB memory use
In my experience it is very much scene dependent. In this particular scene, and with the standard settings of the benchmark used, regular Cycles-X wins - in particular taking GPU memory usage into consideration.
I decided to render a few other scenes from blender.org:
I rendered each scene twice to ensure loading and kernels etc. were all taken out of the equation.
As you can tell, regular Cycles-X actually wins with the Lone Monk scene and Sky Texture demo scene compared to E-Cycles.
One thing that is often omitted is the actual memory usage: regular Cycles-X wins by no small degree in every single case. This could mean that your scene may render in regular Cycles, but chokes on your GPU with either E-Cycles or K-Cycles.
K-Cycles is actually worse than E-Cycles in this respect: it uses almost twice as much GPU memory compared to vanilla Blender. But E-Cycles doesnāt impress either here.
You will have to ask yourself whether it is worth it. In my experience before the introduction of Cycles-X it was. Now? I am unsure. I believe some E-Cycles users seem to perceive E-Cycles to be a great deal, but I am unsure how much of a role their own inherent bias plays (since they purchased it for quite a bit of money, their perception is, I think, sometimes predisposed to thinking that the extra cost equals a more performant or quality product. Certainly the developer seems to take advantage of psychological marketing āstrategiesā).
I mainly got E-Cycles for the light linking and stuff. But soon Vanilla Blender will have similar options, and there are dev builds with these features already available.
Obviously I did not optimize the above scenes - merely hit F12 - so things could be sped up. But that holds true for regular Cycles-X as well.
That memory usage, however, IS an issue, though, with both E-Cycles as well as K-Cycles. I noticed that a few months ago when I could not render a scene in K-Cycles, but it would render in vanilla.
Anyway, you will have to decide for yourself.
3080TI 12GB, 3900X / 64GB
12 Likes
With the massive number of people using blender today, Iād put money on 50% of all E/K cycles users having a copy they did not pay money for. There are packages with every single blender related item from github+blender.org+gumroad+blendermarket+udemy+studio.blender+cloud.blender+cgboost+ukramedia+creativeshrimp+elsewhere
Also since Apple joined the Blender dev Cycles also uses the Apple 3D acceleration API which is quite nice to see.
Particularly when you have heavy scenes and get close to fill up the VRAM if one has the 64 BG mac models.
Cycles X viewport is just a blessing because how fast it works compared to old versions.
This really helped a lot in 3D rendering for interior design in my classes.
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Luxrender is amazing. Metropolis light sampling. OIDN. Light Groups. PhotonGI Cache, OPTIX, Adaptive sampling, Bi-directional path-tracing for fast reflective and refractive caustics, integrated material and object library.
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butā¦
BlendLuxCore v2.5
Supported Blender versions: 2.82 to 2.92. Will not work on 2.93+.
(Note: you can use an automatic build of the under development v2.6 if you need to use Blender v2.93)
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Blender 3.0
https://download.blender.org/demo/cycles/flat-archiviz.blend
GPU Optix: 1:50:91 i guess those RTX cores matter and i hit GPU(RTX3060) memory limitation(6Gb VRAM) and system memory limitation(16Gb RAM)
Maximum GPU power draw(HWiNFO): 119w.
Win 10 Pro, Nvidia Studio Drivers 472.84
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Yup, ive been using 2.6 with Blender 2.93.7 LTS with no crashes and no trouble. At the end of the day it has its pros and cons.
To exploit luxrenders full capability of metropolis light transport and bi-directional path tracing meaning full caustics calculated from eye rays and camera rays, you need to run it in CPU mode, and for me that means a full 10 hr overnight render. Most people have a powerful GPU and a standard CPUā¦ So most people use Cycles but of course you might get your render done in 10 mins vs 10 hrs, but its not doing most of the caustics that you would see in reality, so it lacks realism.
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Have anyone checked how memory usage looks when rendering multiple passes?
Iām getting bonkers results when scenes that could fit in RAM with pre-X Cycles now are crashing Blender due to memory and swap limit. Iām talking 256GB and more.
This effect is more visible with high res renders like 8k, 16k or more.
While I have no specific numbers on this, I noted that Optix scenes crash occasionally on rendering. If you restart Blender than open the very same file and press render it renders fine.
I do think that there may be an issue with clearing memory without restarting Blender.
Iām on a 2070, 64GB RAM, and a Ryzen 5950x. Blender is 3.0.0 on Win 10 Pro 64 Bit. GPU driver is 395+
In a situation when you have only one chance to make the best & most realistic possible rendering, if you are not in a hurry, Luxcore will give you the best results. Cycles might be faster in most situations, but Luxcore handles complex lighting much better.
I understand that many strive for 100% realism, but I also believe that 95% of clients donāt see the difference of the last 20% of realism added (80-100%).
Even less so consumers.
Many of them are not aware of the quality normal good renderings create and think they are photos.
Apart from that there are clients who actually prefer to still show a little that the rendering shows something not in existence yet.
Iām not saying itās not a great thing to strive for photo realism, but in many cases 80-90% is more than enough to get payed for.
Which allows us to move in to the next project earlier.
Of course there are also use cases were 100% photo reality is asked for.
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I totally agree: untrained eyes canāt tell the difference until you show them.
And even for our 3d artists eyes, unless you set up a caustics example scene, can be difficult to spot if an image lacks that āextra bit of realismā.
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i have also made this experience. several architectural visualization clients asked me to not go further with realism because if it looks too much like a photo this can lead to problems later on once the building is built and something doesnāt look 100% the same in every detail. 
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I would call myself trained, but I often donāt see shit until somebody points me in the right direction.
With direct comparisons it becomes easier, but you have to take into account the fact that if a person never sees the ābetterā version, they often canāt even imagine the difference in quality (me included).
So the question if it is necessary to go the extra mile is a strong one. In the past I was motivated to go the extra mile in regards to rendering, now I rather spend the time optimizing something that makes a visible difference that can be observed easier (models, lighting and shaders for example).
Perfectionism is a helluva drug, its better to stay sober, unless you get paid for the excessā¦
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Donāt forget not all rendering is client work. At lot of it is people doing personal projects, artists trying to make a nice looking render, in that regard if i could chose a render engine that had light transport realistic to the real world including all the caustics, volumetrics, spectral effects etc i would.
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