Most Mac users moved to PC due to the lack of proper support for CUDA, RTX, OpenCL, etc. Premium will be only for Windows and Linux first, but you can get E-Cycles 2.92 for Mac already with the base speed-up for CUDA, E-Cycles AI-Denoiser, persistent data, and more.
I finance E-cycles because Iām happy with how mathieu is involved in support. From my experience, every e-mail question is answered within 24 hours, usually within an hour. When there is a problem, he solves it. Itās a very professional approach. He polished the code to a high quality and in my opinion I will have no problems in the future. I am happy that someone dealt with
this field with Blender.
I donāt write much here because English is not my mother tongue. However, I have been wanting to provide feedback from user E-Cyscles for many months.
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Just like beginning artists want free or cheap tools to make a living. Independent developers also have to make money for a living. Unless they are getting massive funded like Blender Foundation. The current open source licensing policy is just too ideal. I need E-Cycles to work, and if he canāt make money I wonāt be able to use E-Cycles.
Or it just couldnāt be started.
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What are the lies you are referring to ?
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No, it was for one year at $549 as stated on the invoice.
Perpetual V-Ray licenses for Blender users, including node license + V-Ray Standalone version:
380ā¬ V-Ray 3
190ā¬ Upgrade from V-Ray 3 to V-Ray Next
190ā¬ Upgrade from V-Ray Next to V-Ray 5
380ā¬ V-Ray 5
Add your own country VAT to those prices
If itās a straight copy of your code, then how come itās faster? And how come it also optimizes the viewport rendering much faster?
Before you make libelous claims, you should check your facts. If you think it is a straight copy, then prove it.
It is not a copy, so please quit spreading disinformation OR prove your case.
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Iām personally going to stick with the facts as I see them:
ā¢ E-Cycles has been my wingman for something like two years now, and has never once let me down or disappointed me.
ā¢ Mathieu and E-C have a proven track record of excellence.
ā¢ I went from six years of Octane to E-C and was never once left wantingā¦ never looked back.
ā¢ Mathieu eats, sleeps, breaths E-C. It apparently is his callingā¦ His mission in lifeā¦ Folks with that kind of dedication to their product/craft is in short supply these days.
ā¢ Mathieu is Johnny-on-the-effing-spot with tech support. And he pounced on the Clay/AO feature I desperately needed a ways back, in addition to various small suggestions Iāve made.
ā¢ I am a professional 3d artist who needs a professional render engine that is developed/tweaked/perfected and supported by a professional.
ā¢ Mathieu IS the man!
ā¢ E-Cycles IS my render engine!
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Hopefully some genius is inspired by this discussion and releases soon another fork with raw viewport performance on par with max.
He could really charge a lot if he is first 
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Yeah, but if you want 100 Render nodes it is an additional 16000$.
Or 12000$ for 50.
Measly 20 nodes are still nearly 6000$
For e-Cycles they are free.
If you want a lot of render power VRay is really expensive.
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Seeing similar here with the $1 version, but actually e-cycles was SLOWER, even with the āvery fastā preset. My own test scene.
Cycles 2.93 - 4:07
E-Cycles 2.93 - 4:41
Oh well!
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This leads to nothing, if you want to buy K-Cycles do it, if you want to buy E-Cycles do this.
@Lumpengnom
I will make some tests with your file and post my results here.
Cheers, mib
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@Lumpengnom
OK, my tests with 2.93 Beta with your linked HDR:
Cycles 04:13
E-Cycles default 04:06
E-Cycles very fast 02:33
I use 90% dimension, for my poor RTX 2060 4K is to heavy.
This is one of the rare files I donĀ“t get 2x performance with loading a Cycles file and hit F12, no idea why.
Cheers, mib
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Agree 
strange
Thanks for showing it was a pack including 2019+2020! I was ready to ask the Blender Market if they somehow made an error.
The fact that @eklein claims it is his code, then say both are based on Lukas work (wrong too) while he just uses my solution with some slightly changed values. I would like to post the code parts in E-Cycles, K-Cycles and then compare to Lukas Patch, but @eklein still didnāt provide code since my request 3 days ago.
Itās not necessary anyway, he already gave that information here. He is mapping samples values to a distance value like E-Cycles. To show how much work went in the 2 years since he took part to my making-of course, E-Cycles uses a distance value of 0.2 at 256 samples, while Erik uses 0.2 at 250 samples. Iāll let you judge of the value of that change. The benefit of that change is that it will render faster at 250 samples, thanks to a lower value, at the cost of image quality. But his benchmarks look better and some people fall in. Of course he will claim itās a simple Idea, like the full research team who spend months of work to just change a variable. Yet neither the research team, nor Lukas, nor the BF found that solution which as an Artstation search can show ensure high quality renderings in any case.
Contrary to what he says, Lukas patch only replaced a fixed 1.0 factor in the sobol code by a variable, which he exposed to the UI. The only important change in that patch is line 56 you can enter your value manually here and it will render faster, the smaller you set it like writing shift *= 0.1 instead of shift *= kernel_data.integrator.scrambling_distance;. The rest of the patch is UI code and things to bring the user-entered value to Cycles. It was not even Lukas work. Lukas just made a quick patch based on a paper from a French research team. Both Lukas variant and the research paper had issues. The original paper if implemented as exposed is 30% to 50% slower than my solution, Lukas solution as said by himself many times can brake your renders and was thus never committed.
2 following patches were needed later due to some changes in Cycles and to make it work with OptiX. Both changes are in the code form E-Cycles he requested and got.
If you still want to fund someone claiming to have made a break through after 2 years of intensive research, not mentioning original authors anywhere, you can pay $49 to encourage him to continue on that path!
Or you can get the work from itās original author and available for free ($1 on the Blender Market) like hundreds of people are doing each day!
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At last, is there anyone that has tested the $1 version of e-Cycles and had really a 2X gain in the rendering times (by not having any quality loss, of course)? Some example images?
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@bliblubli sorry, of course, iāve using E-Cycles from a long time ago, BUT I compared my scene with both Cycles (Official deafult v2.92) and E-Cycles 2.92 and settings are the same and boom, same render time. Also when I select Very fast settings it has been changed just AO bounces from 3 to 1 (Enable Simplify option > AO Bounces 1 in Cycles default) and it will be fast as E-Cycles. Really strange!
I did a quick test. The output I used is 100%. If I have time Iāll try later your settings at 200%.
Vanilla: 2 min 27 sec 1024 samples
E-Cycles: 1min 45 sec 1024 samples
The interesting part is at 256 samples with adaptive sampling on. Renders time were identical, though I havenāt messed with the settings much.
Vanilla: 27 sec 256 samples + adaptive sampling
E-Cycles: 27 sec 256 samples + adaptive sampling
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