After an extended period using only mac I’ve recently grabbed a nice dell workstation and have been doing some Blender testing on it. The last time I used Blender in Windows was a year or two ago and back then Windows render times were severely gimped due to the compiler Blender was using for it’s builds.
Is that still a thing? Or are Blender builds on Windows now just as fast as their mac and Linux counterparts?
The change from vc 2008 to 2013 has given substantial improvements to render times, around 15-20% I believe. I think Linux is still slightly faster, Mac I have no idea, I never heard Mac was faster.
That’s good to know. The reason I asked was because I noticed my task manager only getting to about 60-80% total CPU usage while rendering. Is this normal on Windows? Cycles spikes my cpus to a full 95-100% on the mac, for example.
From my experience… CUDA based renderings have the same rendering speed linux vs windows.
Mine usually jumps to 100% as soon as I hit the button 
Thanks for the insight! Sounds like the windows version is now up to snuff with the move to the new compiler. I feel better about building a pc workstation now. 
When you are in taskmanager programs, rightclick on blender, to go to its process
Over there you can change the priority of blender (so windows will pay more attention to it), right click on the process > change prio
Be warned dough setting it to real-time, will put the CPU to real time all CPU power to blender, your computer might not respond to you anymore (till blender is finished doing whatever you order it to do).
On the other hand a thing i often do, is to put it below normal while rendering; so i can still do other things like checking my email, or surfing the web, watching a youtube or so, render will take longer, but its more a background process then…
Personally while I use Windows on my main sytem, these days linux, like “linux mint” are very usable platforms as for a desktop and a very good alternative to it. I dont know for videocard drivers, but i always keep one or two systems on linux; with open office on it i not really miss Bill on them
If my main systems where not preinstalled i’d be running all linux systems now.
There is still some slight advantage with non blender software, to use windows for now, but not for long i think. As linux is catching up fast, faster then MAC / Microsoft.
And then there’s the reports that Cycles on Windows 8 is slightly faster than on Windows 7, but Linux is still reported to be somewhat faster unless you find a MingW build (in which the times become roughly the same).
I don’t mind a 5-10% difference, but before the new compiler it was like, 50% or something ridiculous like that. I can’t test for sure now without dual booting Linux on the same system so I was hoping someone else already knew for sure. It’s not a huge deal as I need to use windows like it or not (damn Adobe and their lack of Linux support). But it sure would be nice if the windows version wasn’t gimped anymore.
Under Linux/Mac. same performance. I have no idea about WIN performance.
The reason I asked was because I noticed my task manager only getting to about 60-80% total CPU usage while rendering.
I’m a little curious to what version of Windows you have. And, where you have set the Power Plan which is available from the start menu. As the Ape mentioned mine also jumps to 100% after hitting F12. And, mine is Windows 7 home premium I think. Yeah, home premium and I thought Windows simply went to 100% as a given when rendering.
Hmm, I think I was only interactively rendering in the viewport when I checked it. I’ll try an f12 render when I get a chance and see if it goes to 100%.
You can also set the number of CPU’s in the render (I have six, but I use five). That might be better than changing the priority. I have had some really hard crashes in the past when I gave Blender all CPU’s while rendering, so I think it’s best to play it safe and not give it the whole cpu. Maybe the interactive render only used 80% because you could’ve set the starting resolution higher (I think the default is 128 but some of us can handle 256).
It’s a horrible idea to set any process to real-time, especially if the process uses Windows in any way. If it writes a temp file, uses CUDA, etc, there’s a chance that it’ll crash, and even when it doesn’t it’ll be slower than high-priority. It’s best to leave blender in “above-normal” priority to avoid conflicts with Windows internal functions. As long as you aren’t using tons of other programs just a tiny bit of priority will ensure most of the resources go to the program.
I did a few more tests with 2.72 and I’m getting 100% cpu utilization. Must have just been the build i was working on at the time. Or my scene, who knows?
Still curious if a windows build is as fast as a linux one, though. If anyone manages to do a test, please post it here.
Thanks!
Windows 8 and windows 10 preview is about same performance, if anyone is wondering.
Linux (ubuntu 14.04) is still slightly faster for me (cpu rendering).
I do not recommend fiddling with the priority of a process. Any operating system will strive to give any CPU-hungry process as much CPU time as it can, because otherwise that resource would go to waste. However, the algorithms that are used by a process-monitoring package (e.g. Windows Task Manager, Linux “top,” etc …) are not always comparable. They are estimates, weighted and rounded over some interval in a way that the software-designers felt was appropriate and fair.
If you wanted to do a true side-by-side comparison, I would simply look at completion times, over a fairly long period of time say “frames per hour.” Compensating of course for the relative speed of the hardware particularly including its I/O subsystems, and presuming that memory-availability is not an issue.
Also, remember that in both systems you can run Blender from the command-line, and that when you do so, Blender does not run its expensive user-interface. This can improve render performance noticeably.
By my understanding, Blender has always had a slight performance advantage under Linux. It’s not enough to make it worth changing your entire pipeline, but definitely something to consider if you’re building a dedicated Blender workstation or render cow.
Yes, I did some testing with the BMW scene, for me it was quite an improvement in Linux.
On Win 7.1 render times were around 1:54 (i7 2600k)
On Linux Ubuntu Studio, Lubuntu, and OpenSuse they were around 1:30
I believe I was testing with Blender 2.70.
Sorry to resurrect a dead thread, but I’ve been doing some cross platform rendering in the office and I’m noticing that Windows workstations that are faster than our macs are being outpaced by the slower macs (official 2.74). Is there any way to get a faster windows build of Blender? I seem to remember that MinGW compiled versions always seemed to render faster than the VC compiles, but they had some limitations…? Does anyone have any insight on the matter?
Also, I’ve tried both of the win64 development builds and there seemed to be no difference in render times at the time, but I could be wrong there. Why are there 2 different builds for win64 on buildbot anyway?