OK, Off Topic but still Blender related.
Another forum I frequent, which is a small tech related forum, have an idea for reviewing and benchmarking hardware and I was suggested to put together a test blender scene. More lightweight than the usual benchmarks, since old hardware will be tested.
I’ve put one together re-using a couple of assets that I created for my (never ending) lounge scene, primarily because the shaders used are complex.
To test that it wasn’t going to lock up anyone’s system for a stupid amount of time, I installed blender on my old HP6710b. Low on memory and power.
I’ve rendered the test scene on my main rig with CUDA, in around 3.5 minutes. Newer NVidia cards will eat it much faster.
On the laptop, it’s been going now for 23 minutes, and ETA is another 1.25 hours.
I’ve optimised the render setting to account for no GPU rendering (reduced the tile size, basically), but hell, it shows how far we’ve advanced. Kinda gobsmacked at the difference.