Hm, how its possible to take a FREE code of someone else (original Cycles), tweak it and sell it for money??? Original author(s) spent years to build it and give us all their work for free… Its like takeing some free textures from the web and sell them for money because of tweaking the contrast or resize or some…
@wolfie138: To render Your anim use SheepIt renderfarm - its FREE and FAST as hell!
I don’t think this is the right way to look at E-Cycles. With this logic all developers that create addons for Blender should not be allowed to charge any money because is build on top of Blender which is develop with FREE code.
Think of E-Cycles like a paid addon to Cycles. Bliblubli has spent many months or year developing and testing new algorithms to improve the performance in Cycles.
He is also offering weekly custom builds with this new features, up to 2x Cycles performance and support. It is not unreasonable for him to monetize his efforts so he can continue this work. All of us need to make a living.
If you don’t see the value of E-Cycles or for that matter any of the available paid addons to Blender no need to buy it.
Many of us who have purchase E-Cycles and enjoy much faster Cycles rendering now are happy to have it available. I for one have no interest in working with a render farm. Bliblubli has said that he will make all this improvements available to Blender in one year so everyone can benefit.
Oh you use Cycles for free, so you never funded anything, although you found enough money to buy a computer that runs cycles. You benefit from other giving 27 000 $/month. And you download it for free also and bandwidth cost a lot. So you actually take money from others without giving back.
And you take time to judge other, without taking the time to know their background. When you will have contributed over more than 3 years code to Blender and do free support on your week ends and try to live from donations, you can speak. Until that day, I wish you to live in a world only made of people who judge other and live from others efforts without doing any themselves, like you.
By the way, leave that community, people are all bad here and even when spending time to help you, they don’t manage to solve YOUR problem Restricted Glow in Compositor … Bad, bad community 
Yeah it is possible since a lot of addons here are paid, because guess what it takes a lot of time to actually do them and in case you didn’t notice a lot of those addons are extremely useful and save your time (ergo money if you use blender to earn money). Althou I prefer “one time payment for unlimited use” model (higher price) I really understand this subscription style everybody is doing now (it is actually healthier for developers and helps them to keep their head above the water). Do you realize that Cycles is quite slow in compare with other render engines right? This enhancement is quite something and the price is reasonable. And as bonus there is a chance that these improvements might get in the vanilla build(FREE) in the future.
You too can get the source code, then re-distribute at your own will, as you choose: sell or share freely
Well, by that point of view, it’s also not fair to sell renders or make money doing animations with Blender.
Well, going further. It is not fair to sell any software made in language that is available for free. 
Actually, to be frank, I wish I could afford to do all that for free. It really warms to have your support.
Man… those render times are ridiculous. With such speedups i’m shocked your improvements have not been considered to be included in master. (or rather have been considered and denied) From my impression it’s minimum 1.5x speedup in most cases. Good job! Hope some of this will eventually make it to master.
Thanks After one year, I’ll submit them to be included in master.
Eh, yep, bliblubli, looks like U really know me and my efforts to help the community of Blender - at least good enough to judge me that Im NOT GIVING BACK…
Others: THX for all of Your replies and ideas - I will take them into consideration, especially EKlein for his descriptive and clean point of view - THX Bro!
I play with your rules 
Will admit , more and more eager to see how your work progresses.
Main question, how much (if any) work you’ll put in for the OpenCL aspect of E-Cycles. Most seems (unless i missed something for which I apologize) around CUDA optimizations.
Have you also considered to reach out to Ton / Blender dev team, and become a full fledged Blender DEV?
Regarding OpenCL, some more improvements will come soon.
Regarding the model of funding my work. well the problem is still the same with working for the BF, it would require more people to donate. At least with this system, people know where the money exactly goes: a faster cycles and they get it now.
This is amazing. There’s been so much talk about scrambling distance improving the rendering speed. But that seems to have some problems that could go along with it and don’t seem to have nearly as much speed improvements at this does. Are there any situations where this wouldn’t work out well? Where it would show errors during certain animations the way that scrambling distance does?
I use it for archviz, so at least in fly-through videos it works. And until now, it works for all customers. I know one of them rendered a video with fire.
The only way to know if it works in your case is to try. I fixed all problems reported until now in less than a day.
By the way, I’m going to release a pro version based on 2.7 which offer the exact same noise as master as an option for those finding it important. Using this option would still bring 1.5x faster rendering, with up to 4x faster when using the full feature set. In both case, it will become more with the upcoming updates.
Hello!
I rendered a scene of my own and the results were really impressive. After several tests I found that using both GPU and CPU (1080 and 1950x) was my choice to go, cutting render times by almost 20% over the same combination in normal Cycles. Comparing it to only using GPU or CPU, it was faster by almost 40%, which is great.
Cycles CPU 32x32 = 4:25:39
Cycles CPU 16x16 = 4:20:07
Cycles GPU 256x256 = 3:31:25
Cycles GPU+CPU = 2:08:71
E-Cycles CPU 16x16 = 4:15:58
E-Cycles GPU 256x256 = 2:34:24
E-Cycles GPU+CPU = 1:46:40
However, I came across with a flickering problem while rendering animation. It was the same problem described in this discussion: https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/93379/what-is-causing-my-frames-to-flicker-after-being-rendered. After trying so many different things to solve it and having not figuring it out, I went back to 2.79 where everything worked amazingly. I don’t think it has anything to do with Bliblubli’s build because the same error happened in the newest Blender 2.8 branch, but I second the motion about a 2.79 version of E-Cycles.
Thank you very much for your efforts, bliblubli
how did you render, as a movie format? i’ve been following other advice and rendering frames as PNGs to assemble in the VSE; just wondering if that would produce the same issue at the end encoding when the VSE converts to the actual movie format, or if it’s specific to the render engine.