where is the long pre processing time you speak about ?
at 30seconds I even add 30 cars or so at once and they instantly render
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this is a low poly scene, i tried with some trees of 5mil polys instances and photoscanned assets instances months ago, moving the object was way faster in octane. Cycles canāt handle such high poly geo, it reload the entire mesh for some reason and freeze everything
i will do some other test like that when octane 2.8 is out
Thanks a lot for those real use case comparisons. Itās a pleasure to see that although 100 samples are enough, even at 200, E-Cycles was actually 2s faster then Octane at also 200 samples 
Regarding the pre-processing time in E-Cycles, the evaluation is done on Blender side and is much faster if you use group instances instead of copies. (create a group of the of the object to be instanced with ctrl+G, then hide the original on a layer which is not active, then go to add menu -> group instance (at the bottom) and create as much copies as you want of this group instance. It should be much faster.
Of course you can combine it with the persistent data option to have both a fast first pre-processing and no following pre-processing.
Iām updating 2.8x to latest master
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Hi, as a long term Octane user and now E-Cycles user there is a lot to do for the Cycles developer to get even close to Octane.
For speed E-Cycles is a big step forward.
Octane use 25% of GPU memory, it use 0% CPU at render.
You can surf the internet or do some office work during render on all GPU without lag.
Very fast volume render on GPU and multiple light sources donĀ“t slow down your render.
I think Cycles has stop development since the start of Blender 2.8, only small additions and fixes. The patch for OIDN was discussed kind of āDo we really need itā and at this point most major render engines already support it.
OK, stop wining and it is good E-Cycles is there to show what is possible.
Cheers, mib
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Hi Mib,
regarding surfing on the net while rendering, it works on windows, only Linux is slow, not sure why as the cubins are the same on both. I already have ideas to make memory consumption lower, the May update already reduced memory usage. Note that E-Cycles is 4 months old.
Cheers,
Mat
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Hallo Mathieu,
I must say that Iām actually experiencing pretty long loading times before the render, sometimes 5 to 10 seconds (CPU i7 + 2080Ti).
Hi, E-Cycles evolve very fast so no critics, it was more getting tiered of Cycles development.
Cheers, mib
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E-Cycles vs Cycles direct simultaneous comparisonā¦nuff said. Also for those questioning scene loading times this video should add clarity.
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@bliblubli are You sure, that presets in Mac versions are ok? In very fast, Fast, Medium there are very high max bounces (32) set up, and in Slow there are only 12 set upā¦ Are these ok?
+1 id also like to know that!
Those are right, because the bounces are stopped by the AO simplify code, so these values just ensure the AO simplification only decide when to terminate a path. You can try with lower values of course. Lowering the transmission and transparent bounces can make rendering faster depending on your scene. Those are set so high to ensure trees render correctly (where the leaves are mostly quads with alpha, inducing a lot of transparent bounces) .
If you find better values for a specific scene, you can save your own quick presets. For example for interiors with little to no transparency (real glass is transmission), you could set those very low and speed-up your renders.
Hallo Andrea,
5 to 10 seconds pre-processing is actually pretty ok. Or do you mean it happens despite using the persistent data option? Or itās slower than with buildbots?
On the topic of slow start up in Cycles compared to other engines:
I always wondered how much of that actually stems from the fact that in order to get sub-d rendered we have to use the modifier. Maybe a solution like MAX with Arnold would be faster? I think only the unsmoothed mesh gets passed to the render engine in MAX/Maya.
Hi Mathieu,
I have successfully installed the thing and it works great
Thanks for the help!
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Itās possible to do the subdiv on the engine side, but it brings the risk of different looks compared to viewport depending on the implementation.
Hi, thanks for the comparison.
Maybe I missed the info, but did you use exactly the same settings, especially the"AO trick" in both scenes?
Iām asking because I tested some of my scenes today and the only real speedups I get is by using low scrambling distance values, about 30 %, which is good in itself, but your speedups are spectacular!
Some (quite) more I could get is by using the AI denoise, but in my scene it performs really bad in shadow areasā¦
No tricks, just used the E-Cycles Quick Settings as shown in the vids and Cyclesā Limited Global Illumination. For E-Cycles vs Octane/Blender I just adjusted materials to look as similar to each application as time allowed, but the lighting source, an HDRI Environment Map, is of the same intensity.
thanks for answer. Iāll try with some lower settings.
Hi everyone,
new builds are up for Windows with all the changes made in Blender 2.8 as of today. Mac and Linux will follow soon. As a lot of breaking changes were introduced (It was a real commits bombing before the bug-fixing only period started with lights, color management, shaders alpha, textures channels, etc. heavily changed) I recommend to stay on the last version for serious work. I did some quick test and it seems to render correctly in the scenes I tested.
Have fun with it
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Mac builds are now also available
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