The performance increased noticable but i still think its way too low…
I don’t really know what this is causing, for example, in the middle of a big fight in l4d (left 4 dead) there are much more polygons than in my average blender scene but the games still manages to continue to throw out a stable 75 frames a second…
Also the lighing shouldnt be the cause since even crysis at max settings gives me more FPS than rendering a scene(1 frame per 2 minutes…).
Fact is that games use my GPU (HD3850) to process the screen while Blender uses the CPU (Q9300) which should be much more faster?
Does someone know the cause? Are other modeling software maybe better optimized (no offense)?
If you’re unhappy with the speed of Blender’s internal renderer, you might want to try Lux, or one of the other unbiased external renderers. They produce amazingly realistic images, and I think they will also make you feel a bit better about rendering an image in two minutes.
Crysis and L4D take hundreds of shortcuts that do not work in many situations and are very limited.
Blender’s renderer is slow but fairly accurate, versatile, and works in most situations. If you would like a really slow and 100% accurate renderer try indigo. If you want a really fast renderer, go with crysis or UT3. In fact, to get an idea of how many shortcuts these games take try building a very small level from scatch and make it look as good as the origanal game. No useing any presets.
As the poster directly above me stated, there are several rendering engines that give at least blenders quality and are signifigantly faster. Yaf(a)ray is popular here.
Man, blender render not only is more capable than 3DStudio max but it is in many times more faster, i tested it myself.
3DStudio comes with mental wich could be faster than Blender render but the exporting time you must face some times becomes a problem.
Blender internal is very fast if you use it in he right way and inside its limits, for example if you are doing raytracing, make sure don’t get your scene in the teapot-stadium fashion. beacuse it has a poor subdivision method wich now that is fixed in 2.5.
Also you can do Ambient Oclussion in a really faster maner with AAO.
Blender Internal renderer does some things faster than others but it can be pretty quick. If you start a thread in “Work in Progress” and post some renders, render times and talk a bit more about your materials and lighting - people will be able to help you a lot more specifically, give artistic hints if you want them and so on.
There is a completely different approach to rendering images in a typical 3d Game and Blender.
3d games use a process called Rasterisation, which aims at high speed without caring for physical correctness.
Blender and other 3d apps use Raytracing to render an image, which is far slower but creates physically correct results and thus can lead to photorealistic Images.
Modern Graphics Cards consist of a high amount of highly specialized little processors that have mainly been developed for one purpose and that is fast rasterisation graphics.
CPUs, which are used for Raytracing on the other hand are multipurpose processors which are not optimized to do raytracing, but for being useful for all different kinds of calculations.
But the game begins to change:
With the development of programmable shaders on Graphics Cards in the last Generations (ATI since X1900, Nvidia since G80 alias Geforce 8x00), it is possible to use GPUs for General Purpose Calcualtions too ([utl=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gpgpu]GPGPU) which can help speeding up raytracing as well as soon as rendering engines are able to support GPGPU with APIs lke OpenCL, DirectCompute, CUDA or Stream. (Here is a Demo of a Renderer called Vray, accelerated by Nvidia Graphics Cards)
Intel is currently developing a chip called Larabee, which consists of many (maybe around 32) small CPU-Cores+ some additional instructions and is mainly created for Applications like Raytracing but it will take some more time to tame this beast.
Other companies like Caustic are creating special raytracing cards with own APIs to speed up raytracing.
Man, blender render not only is more capable than 3DStudio max but it is in many times more faster, i tested it myself.
In my experience, Blenders raytracer is the slowest I’ve ever used. It has been rectified to an extent, but it’s still very slow.
If you’re looking for the fastest possible CPU based renderer, you could always give Hypershot a try. It’s what I use exclusively when producing work for clients. It’s blazingly fast, but will cost you a pretty penny.
There is a completely different approach to rendering images in a typical 3d Game and Blender.
3d games use a process called Rasterisation, which aims at high speed without caring for physical correctness.
Blender and other 3d apps use Raytracing to render an image, which is far slower but creates physically correct results and thus can lead to photorealistic Images.
That’s not the whole truth… Blender uses ray tracing only for reflection/refraction, shadows and ao, but the first scene intersection is still calculated with rasterization and then secondary rays are shot from these positions to get reflection and so on. So you can also disable ray tracing and you still can see your scene, simply without the ray traced effects…
Other render engines like Yafaray, Luxrender, Vray, Indigo, Maxwell and more are full ray tracers, so all intersections are found by tracing rays. It doesn’t really matter if the first scene intersection is found by ray tracing or rasterization in general, newer engines use mostly pure ray tracing but blender’s render engine had no ray tracing features at the beginning, but it was added later.
