@bliblubli Can you compare for us both 2.92 and 2.93 build differences? Whats changed?
I hoped I would finally get real competition from an open source developer, sadly itās just one of my former course student who took the course I made 2 years ago and he just slightly changed the default values of the patch given in the course to make better benchmark results (I can do it easily too, but image quality will suffer of course).
He thought Eevee was better than Cycles and spread that Idea for years, then told as much he could that E-Cycles had bad image quality (you can watch the E-Cycles gallery to see how good you find his opinion):
to finally use scrambling distance in his build with even harder settings to push render times furtherā¦
He is good in marketing with his affiliate and even managed to let some skilled creators here think he came up with an original product. At least he showed their is interest in simple builds with no real new features.
So I could make a version of E-Cycles with none of the new features, just basically E-Cycles from 2 and a half years ago for $39 as it takes little time to manage a build like that. At least it would have proven image quality and I could add a slider to get 4x faster render times for people wanting good render times and not caring about quality much.
$500 seriously? And ran out while you can still use it? Why do you feel the need to spread false information?
For now, 2.93 builds have mostly changes from the Blender side. The new features are still getting polished 
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Youāre absolutely right mathieu, I was wrong to say around $500. Sorry for spreading misinformation.
My name Eric Klein and I am the developer of K-Cycles. I am professional developer in graphics for many years and took mathieu course over 2 years to learn about coding in the Blender environment and have recommended it. This course used the Lukas Stockner patch on scrambling distance from the blender foundation and optimize utilization for Cuda.
The key to performance in both in E-Cycles and K-Cycles is using scrambling distance patch with high GPU optimizations. That is it. We can say that E-Cycles RTX is using Lukas Stockner patch on scrambling distance from Blender Foundation for the performance improvements. Easy to test just set noise level or scrambling distance to 1.0 and see how performance is reduce.
K-Cycles is not the code from the course. The old course only cover Cuda no Optix or RTX. I donāt think is usable now since the Blender master has change so much. K-Cycles does use scrambling distance, but that is based on Lukas Stockner patch which the course and E-Cycles RTX also use. The optimization for high GPU utilization in Optix are different K-Cycles RTX needs large tiles and E-Cycles RTX uses regular size.
I have been doing my custom build for couple of years already and describe in detail in my post from a couple of months ago see 2x faster with scrambling distance and high gpu utilization.
The basic scrambling distance and cuda/optix optimization are available now for free at Graphicall. Search for the Bone-Studio build. He has repository and thanks to Juan Gea Rodiguez for offering this build to the community.
I had hope that Blender Foundation would do some of this optimization, but it does not look like is going to happen in near future. I decided to make available my custom RTX build to the community at an affordable price. After doing polishing and adding some new features including a fast viewport and beta testing for a month I release K-Cycles. I does take a bit work to maintain multiple builds, to constantly adjust the code because the blender master is changing, release updates and customer support. I will be adding more unique features over time.
I have no issue with mathieu if he wants to release E-Cycles RTX an affordable price it is currently $300, since my benchmark comparisons were done using Optix and E-Cycles RTX. These benchmarks are fair using identical scrambling distance value, render samples and default settings.
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Hi Eric,
I hope you understand that proposing such low price for a rendering engine is bad for the blender community entrepreneurship.
Because of such moves, we are less likely to see external Render engines such as V-ray or Redshift or other rendering technology made by external entrepreneurs/company ever coming to blender.
i think that Mathieu pricings are honest, if you compare with Octane for example, which is way more expensive/restrictive liscences with slower performances. Same for other famous rendering engine, V-ray and Redshift cost more and are both slower than Mathieuās work.
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What?
In any case, prices are relative. In many countries US $ 50 can mean a monthās salary for some people.
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You canāt expect the whole CG industry to align to third world countries pricing. This argument is just misleading. (+ i believe Piracy or local price reduction is here for this exact purpose.)
I know that the pricing of creations related to blender are always a difficult subject to talk about due to ideology differences, but just as reference:
redshift cost 500-to 900$ yearly
https://www.redshift3d.com/buy
vray can cost up to 1000$ dollar
https://vray.us/vray-max
Octane is 700$ yearly
https://home.otoy.com/render/octane-render/purchase/
In my humble opinion, 50$ for a useful render engine would be just like proposing your service as a senior 3D modeler for 3$/hour. itās just bad for everyone. (+ thatās not even taking the coming inflation into consideration. itās coming to hit us hard in the near future i believe, anyway i rambling hereā¦)
Of course, the fact that these products are forks are still need to be taken into consideration. (You will note that octane also proposes forks.)
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In the case of Cycles mods, a render engine developed by the vendor is not being sold here. From the point of view of meritocracy, it doesnāt seem like a fair comparison.
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How we can compare E-Cycles price which is 300$ when:
- Corona Renderer: 300ā¬ per year or 25ā¬ for educational (can be used commercial!)
- Octane: 200ā¬ per year or free Prime version (can be used commercial)
- FStorm: 240$ per year
- Cycles from Bone-Studio: free
ā¦ and when we compare those renderers with their features to price I donāt think that K-Cycles is ākilling the blender community entrepreneurshipā when E-Cycles price is too high for itās own delivered features, honestly. Itās not a new, commercial, made from scratch renderer, itās a fork with patches from others and own work like optimizations and some cheats (like presets with lower bounces). Sobol patches, Scramble Distance, Light linking etc. those were L. Stockner volunteer work, made for community, for free. Iām not here to be a spokesman for Lukas or anyone else (as I remember Lukas said itās ok for him that someone used those unfinished patches).
Sorry for being maybe offensive or toxic but waiting for new patches from open source community, implemetning them to the own fork and selling it - how can we call it? Maybe itās an entrepreneurship, thereās work made by author. But for me itās unfair especially when we know context - where someone promised to contribute to Cycles after a year and didnāt deliver. Iām not denying work done before and actual done patches for own product.
I would pay money to Blender Foundation like Blender Market, HardOpS or Poliigon and etc. than buy a fork.
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This is ridiculous.
You canāt compare E-Cycles and K-Cycles to these render engines (engine creators, companies with multiple employees not just developers, and with different operating costs). E/K-Cycles guys selling just tweaks to rendering engine called Cycles which is free and created by BI.
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Off-topic:
We canāt see any commercial plugins because of GPL license - those are words from Allegorithmic and Chaos Czech. Chaos is actually making a V-Ray for Blender with using a bridge/new way. Besides, thereās Octane and Redshift and actually Chaos Czech is working for standalone version which should be better for making bridge tool between Blender and Corona. Thereās not any other addons like FumeFX, RayFire or Forest Pack (220ā¬ per year) not because Scatter price is 95$ - itās because of GPL and other reasons like bigger archviz community around 3ds Max. Iām not saying that GPL is bad - itās great but not for commercial addons 
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And that was for 2 years? I never sold a $549 version for one year.
Iām not even bothering to reply to this beyond pointing out how flawed and ridiculous this argumentation is. Completely unnecessary.
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E-Cycles 2x speed-up is now free ($1 as the Blender Market allows) with the presets and quick settings included.
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I donāt really understand the discussion.
In the beginning of the gpu render area there was tvs octane. It was and is awesome fast and later they even got a version for blender. First octane beta standalone costs more then ten years ago 99ā¬. I donāt remember how much the plugin version was but I think it was similar to e-cycles pricing. Support wasnāt that great.
Cycles always was much slower than octane until Matthieu got it made with e-cyles. As usual in the beginning all of those āenginesā where cheaper than later when they got a big userbase.
For me e-cycles is worth the money and superb user support IMO.
I cannot judge if k-cycles would exist without Matthieus know how and also I cannot look into the future if k-cycles would stay this cheap.
IMO a lot of plugins for blender are much to cheap to be developed for a long time.
People shouldnāt forget that the developers need to be able to make a living out of it. As a coder there is much know how needed which might be paid better elsewhereā¦
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tweaks to rendering engine
I donāt know enough on this subject tbh
Forest Pack (220ā¬ per year) not because Scatter price is 95$
I know itās not the only reason, GPL is of course hurting but the massive price difference in everything blender-related might also play a role in discouraging CG entrepreneur & freelance too.
I had many friends working in the CG industry telling me this already.
all i know is that the last time i checked Mathieu did work extremely hard to achieve great result and i really enjoyed his work to create art with.
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I just wish I could use any of this on a Mac. 
Just so I understand this correctly. E-Cycles is created based on other peopleās freely available code, plus some hard work and sweat to stitch it all correctly together.
And now youāre complaining that another developer has created a competitor, and priced it cheaper and is using the same freely available code, and hard work and sweat to stitch it together.
Thatās called a āfree market.ā
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