Guys i still need to do some tests, but i have a question.
Provided that i dont need reflections nor refractions, and we would compare only GI and Photons, what would be faster, Cycles or EEVEE with Irradiance Cache. Cause the IC in EEVEE is insanely fast.
What acclererates the Cache calculation, CPU or GPU, or both ?
I dont have experience with EEVEE IC so much.
Here is some in a pot that does not belong together. Eevee is a real time renderer and cycles a path tracer. Eevee cannot use GI or photons. But optimal for your imaginary job. Irradiance Cache is like baking with textures. This is only useful for still images or if only the camera is animated. With any other form of animation, you would have to recalculate the Irradiance cache with every frame. Then you would be better advised with cycles. Eevees power is speed. cycles accuracy.
Thats what i mean, if i need to recalculate each frame, is cycles faster ?
And sometimes i dont, sometimes the background changes are negligible.
Or better said, is cycles baking better or eevee.
Cycles is slower and it baked nothing it computes physically accurately (in reality just a very bad approximation of reality) Whether cycles is faster or not depends on it, but in the vast majority of cases, eevee will be much, much, much, more … etc. faster. With eevee you have to learn to trick, actually like in the past with simple raytracers. Only that you now have real time with gpu.
As far as I know (haven’t worked with Eevee anymore for several months now) you can’t calculate Irradiance Cache for each frame in an animation. The only thing you can do is calculate Irradiance Cache once for the whole scene before starting to render an animation.