You’re thinking too hard.
Cycles and Eevee will benefit from the same hardware, there is no “eevee” specific build
Interesting… Elaborate?
I’m comparing it to 2.79 Blender Internal. There is a hardware gap veteen 2.79 and 2.8+
what i’m saying is that you dont need to plan an upgrade “around” eevee. Buy the fastest videocard you can afford if you want faster render times, this applies to any GPU based render engine. If you want to use blender internal to render, you can always download 2.79 and use BI. If eevee is too slow, turn down/off options until it is functionally similar BI.
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2.8+ requires hardware that is newer than what 2.79 BI can use. If I go for EEVEE, I need to upgrade a Lot of old hardware,hence the investment. I need to know if 2.8+ investments are worth it, and I need it in numbers, not just my immediate opinion.
I guess it depends on your expectations. Do you need it to be real-time or are you ok with each frame taking a few seconds to render?
Your hardware just need to fulfil minimum requirements to allow EEVEE or Cycles use.
GPU acceleration is a plus.
But you can render with EEVEE or Cycles, just having a CPU in your computer.
EEVEE will only take minutes if scene is heavy with a lot of samples to increase quality.
In that case, Cycles X + use of denoiser could be faster.
And if it is still too slow for you, you can consider OpenGL Workbench Renders.
If you purchase same range of CPU or GPU than the one you have using 2.79, you should expect a gain with a switch to blender 3.0.
For any renderer, a gain of beauty quality of render means a lost in rendertime.
Default settings are often chosen to deliver a medium quality of render.
With Cycles and EEVEE, you have few settings to change to upgrade or downgrade quality, increase/decrease rendertime.
BI was implying a lot more tweaking.
Plus all new tools, you could use to animate and model (ability to mix 3D with 2D grease pencil elements).
Anyways, you should gain work time during setup.
The only downside will be the time to dedicate to learning new stuff and frustration of lost of rare quick BI setups like light linking, halos and particles billboards, coloured viewport AO.
Except that, everything is faster to set-up for a fast and prettier render.
It seems like the question is more ‘is it worth it to invest in new hardware?’
What are you doing with blender? Is this for personal projects, or are you selling your services? If you are making money doing this, then it should be fairly easy to do the math and see how much time it will save you. Not only in raw rendering time, but just working with modern hardware makes the work go faster and easier.
If this is just for personal projects and there is no paycheck to come out of any of this work, then it’s a little tougher of a question. How much do you enjoy blender? What would you be doing if you weren’t using blender?
New hardware is definitely faster than old hardware, so if you do this kinda stuff pretty regularly and you value your time, I would recommend upgrading your hardware, especially if your current hardware can’t even run modern blender. There’s a lot of good stuff in 2.8+
I’ll help you out – most of the people who are agonizing over hardware (and software) purchases are working for themselves on personal projects. I can relate to that since most of what I do in CG at the moment is for my own films, but I’m sure I’m in a slightly different position than Embassy since I would happily drop $800 or so on a newer GPU (if I could find one that isn’t insanely jacked up price wise) while he definitely sounds like he has to be more careful with his purchases.
Right now (at the risk of starting a bit of a OS platform fight) I think one of the best bangs for the bucks for the casual Blender user is actually a Mac Mini M1. With a bit of shopping around, it can be had for about $500 and it performs reasonably well for its price point. With Blender 3.1 gaining Apple Metal GPU support, it will make renders in Cycles more bearable as well. I can’t really think of an equivalent Windows machine with the same price point that would offer better performance (as well as access to all of the extra free software that Apple includes).
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I NEVER thought I would see an Apple machine recommended based on price! (I love Apple BTW)
Apparently, hell has frozen over.
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I used BI for a lot of projects and never expected support for it to be utterly dropped. I think that it should still occupy the “honored ranks” of available Blender renderers, if only so that legacy projects which were rendered with it are not now left out in the cold. It is “yet another” perfectly-fine rendering alternative which I think should still be available and supported.
Given how often people still talk about it, I’m surprised no one’s made a fork from 2.8 for it.
I think that highlights the difficulties with updating that code.
There are real reasons why BF dropped BI.
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I have a bunch of computers whose chipsets are No longer supported. I don’t know the details, but they are too old to run 2.8+
Faster is Better, but real-time is not utterly needed, No. The promise of it just caught my eye.
I am trying to go from small and boring animation Work to something bigger, but the recent epidemic blew up some plans. I am simply trying to crunch numbers om another solution.
Often, what is determinant is version of OpenGL supported.
For some reason, Blender 3.0 installs on the hardware that 2.8 said was obsolete. I will be running some tests now, although I have some weird issues with 3.0 already, but that’s for a different thread…
How do I close this thread?
Eevee is not that fast with complex scenes , and doing lookdev in it is not fun at all when one is dealing with a real production scene due to the constant shader compiling.
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