Ok, but I am not sure what is the difference between 2.7x and 2.8x e-cycles.
Does 2.8x version have all features of 2.7x?
Can the example video be done (up to 15x speedup) with 2.8x version or it lacks Intel AI denoiser or other important feature?
Is 2.8x multi cuda gpu ready?
2.79x has a bonus that allows to render fly-through or multiple views where only the camera moves in one go much faster by computing the preprocessing step only once per animation. It is also slightly faster, mainly because 2.79x is more lightweight than 2.8x. In the example with 15x speedup, the preprocessing takes 15sec (depend on the CPU, I did it on an old 4 core 8 thread intel CPU, a Ryzen or Threadripper will make that faster of course). As the path tracing takes only 22 seconds and the original version on master takes 5 minutes = 300s, it makes the overall speedup 300/(22+15) = 8.1x faster on 2.8x for overall render time. The Path tracing itself is still about 15x faster on 2.8x using new options.
2.79x also has a noise compatibility option, which is mainly useful when you render on render farms to mix the frames, but itās about 30% slower.
2.8x has a beta with a support for fast AI denoising on multiple GPUs (itās actually a fix of a bug/performance bottleneck introduced by animation denoising in master). Itās also in 2.79 standard builds.
the standard version (compiling Blender, adding patches, managing branches, adding new modifiers, customizing Cycles UI, keeping up to date with latest master, starting in new areas of the code)
and the extended version (all of the standard version plus the ~2x speedup from E-Cycles and patches like dithered sobol, scrambling distance from Lukas Stockner or the new Intel AI denoiser patch from @skwerner. It also includes example builds)
What users say about E-Cycles:
Does it work with mining P-106 cards? yes:
Comparison with other denoiser:
Some selection about what students say about the course:
I separated the OSs to make it cleaner on the product page. You just buy one version and Iāll add the other one for free.
Edit: I added the april beta for windows to the Linux page. It will make it better for you to have only one product for all and 1 build more is still clean.
The April update beta is available for Mac and Windows for both 2.8x and 2.79x, Linux will follow.
it has a new option in the sampling panel, Iāll add more details later. A small bench: the classroom scene which had the smallest speedup can now render in 55sec on a 1080Ti, compared to 125sec on latest buildbots, so itās 2,27x faster, including pre-processing time. Thanks to @TiborNyers_BC from boostclock.com for the very detailed benchmark and thorough testing.
It has new presets in the quick settings panel to easily get the most out of E-Cycles.
Plus all the improvements made to the AI denoiser over March
it also uses up to 4x less memory when using the AI denoiser.
According docs and tutorial will follow soon.
Goodmorning Mathieu, and thank you for being so present and professional. I think I will take advantage of the sales today and buy your product. I only have one question: I have a desktop PC (Windows), a laptop (Windows), and a MacBook Pro (running MacOS of course), in order to have e-cycles on every machine, do I have to buy your product twice (one copy for operating system) or 3 times (one for every machine)?
I recommend to start with the Windows april version, even if itās in beta, it has the new UI and presets, much easier to get started with. Will do a short updated tutorial asap.
