Standard Cycles vs E-Cycles vs Cycles-X Render speed

Artwork Blender Tests
1

I have had an interesting set of experiences with Cycles-X since I started using 3.0 Alpha. First, it was more stable on my machine than 2.91 or 2.92 which crashed all the time. I was relegated to using 2.90 both in standard and E-Cycles for stability sake.

For small projects, on two machines, Cycles X was vastly superior in render times, including on my home machine with a kitchen scene rendered on a single 2070super gpu. On my work machine which is the only one with E-cycles, it beat E-cycles when rendering a character. But when I started testing on kitchen scenes, that all changed. E-cycles handedly beat Cycles-x.

Then, I did a compilation of a 3d logo, a previous render (imported as an image as a plane) and a floor plane with leather texture. I saved the file and opened in standard 2.90, E-cycles 2.90, and Cycles-X 3.0 Alpha. Render size was 5,000x5,000 at 128 samples. Scene had a total of 3,198 verts.

Cover-E-Cycles
Cover-E-Cycles600×600 65.9 KB

(Logo purposely blurred in photoshop) My render times (including denoising in the compositor) were as follows:
Standard cycles: 1min 40.9sec
E-cycles: 1min 21.74sec
Cycles X: 2min 30.24sec

I’m using GPU rendering with dual 2070super GPUs. Maybe Cycles x can’t use two GPUs yet? Not sure. If that is the case, rendering on Cycles X twice as fast would have been 1 min and 15 sec.

2 Likes
2

According to this article https://code.blender.org/2021/04/cycles-x/ multi-gpu is not supported yet. For fair comparison, you need to make sure that only single GPU is used in each renderer.

3

I reran the render with just one GPU and the results were:

Standard cycles: 3:01.79
E-Cycles: 2:26.69
Cycles-X: 2:30.84

So Cycles X looks to be basically equal to E-Cycles (2.90.1). And it’s free. Not bad. Hopefully they will add the multi GPU option soon. It would be interesting to know how K-Cycles would compare.

4

Cycles-X and E-Cycles are very dependent on the scene. Some say they get 8x speedup.

There is also K-Cycles which says they are faster than E-Cycles and will be even faster than Cycles-X after Cycles-X is officially released as it builds on the current Cycles core in a different way then E-Cycles. If anyone has K-cycles it would be interesting to know if it really is faster.