Render engines speed comparison - a new perspective

@blenderguru : Cycles, Vray, Redshift, Luxcore, Arnold, Corona, Octane, E-Cycles and Cycles X - in the most thorough, head to head test ever.

And indeed, he did a great job of organizing, testing, rendering and spending huge amount of time and energy on this, and I really appreciate his dedication and awesome work.
There are some mistakes, in my humble opinion, and I will be addressing them here.

One more time, thanks Andrew for the great content, and waiting for more as always.

[robobar]

used octane, cycles and some vray - I always wanted to learn proper vray, it was so damn difficult to get the right settings, I gave up many times and it felt slow (therefore slow to learn), as as octane hit beta I had my first renders I was proud of, the fact that each slight change I did was instatly rendered and fedback in real time made it 1000 times faster to learn.. in the end I felt that some interior scens seemed they could be rendered faster with heavily optimized vray - but I stuck to octane because I could iterate quickly - open scenes - (not interiors) in octane were blazing fast, and feedback was awesome, my workflow was to simply have octane open all the time while I actually built the scene, it gave me a totally new perspective when doing any 3d as I could decide on the fly what I wanted to do - just modeling out stuff and hitting render seemed so slow and I can't go back on a render engine that just works like that .. I'm hooked on interactive rendering, it makes decision making faster ..
In the end I did realize you could probably do interiors faster, again went back to vray, and no.. it's damn to complex, and I couldn't get hooked on that ..
Then I switched to blender (from max/octane).. and from version 2.8 cycles felt very similar to octane, but twice as slow - but eeve was amazing, I was hooked on eeve - and with cycles x / blender 3.0 i guess - cycles finally felt like it was getting as close as possible to octane speeds - and yeah it's native to blender and I think it's much better since octane implementation in max is never going to feel like native - or like vray (vray is almost native to 3dmax, everyone supports it, octane took a decade to get as close as possible and still fails with a lot of plugins), where cycles works with anything that works natively in blender - and honestly, the look - depends on your skills - I had people claiming I did renders in 3dsmax while it was in blender.. after you've gone pro, it doesn't matter, you know the look you like and that's what you're gonna get..
Some things are faster or more convenient in octane, some are in cycles.. I prefer cycles now as it's ease of use and interactivity became almost same as using eeve - and it's compatible with everything blender - if they made octane work in blender natively I'd probably switch in a second..

.. the video doesn't say much at the end - try stuff out, see what you like - use that, the best tool is the one you are productive in
(that said - octane at default settings isn't at it's fastest, I've learned how to optimize it and get 2x speed up every time, with exact same looks, and it's like 3 settings, they should change those defaults - there's almost the same settings in cycles, but they don't feel to speed up that much, still, similar applies, number of bounced etc will affect the render speeds)

[simonmueck]

did not expect that at all lmao - great video tho! got a new sub, liked to see more :)

[WolfMediaProductions]

Thanks for the video man, touched on topics that are often overlooked, a wealth of knowledge here.

I'm currently using Blender for a project and it certainly has a default 'look' to it (flat log/materials never look rough enough). Been using my Davinci experience to add a lot of subtle lens and camera defect effects in the compositor, helps to freshen up the renders.

Biggest issue on the project is trying to implement fog volumes, as Cycles slows down to a crawl, and even after all the waiting the fog is noisy but then looks terrible if denoised in a regular way. Have had a lot of success after learning about render layers. My work around is I actually render the fog in Evee and then layer it in later on, there's more control this way too over it's opacity. Only issue is that reflective materials in Cycles don't show any fog in them, so current challenge is to find a fast workaround for this one drawback.

I just wished when I stated learning 3D stuff that the importance of a good final rendering pipeline had come up sooner, I have so many projects with love poured into them that I never had time to render out xD

[bubblekill]

Naive approach to evaluate things is perfectly valid in science. This is the first step to analytics and problem solving. Thanks Andrew

good video by the way

[rajendrameena]

Today my mind just got a strong hit 💪. I am so relaxed and amazed by this person's explanation that is beyond words.

[TimV]

I think Arnold is the best for best quality.

[coacollective]

Real time render is the way to go! And if you want to go free from subscriptions…Unreal+Blender is the perfect combo!

[RohrbachJewelryDesign]

BlenderGuru made indeed a severe methodology crime in a very irresponsible way.

[xanzuls]

I don't think every render engine has its own way to render, that's not true. At the core almost all path tracers use the same quadratic equations and same trigonometry to render. Optimization on the other hand, that's where different companies have used different tricks to speed up and optimize their render engines. I don't think Cycles has any look for example, the grayish look you get from the filmic color space, if you use ACES or the new color space AGX which was also made by the guy who made filmic then your renders will start to look different. The guy who made cycles used to work for Arnold (solid angle) before Autodesk bought it so he knows them both. And no, speed also matters because of deadlines and turn overs, maybe if you are doing things on your own but speed is very important as well in production because it cost a lot more to render for hours where VFX companies are all about saving money. Octane is made for ease of use and it's great but it lacks the flexibility needed for professional VFX production, it also has a very polished look after rendering which is not always preferred before compositing, if the renders look flat in ACES that's always better in VFX production than rendering with glows and blooms built in. But Octane crashes too much with big scenes and out of core rendering is horrible and it struggles very badly with FOG other than that it's a good render engine that barely fixes the bugs and shows the same tech demo for years in their presentation lol.

[zzador]

A material library has nothing to do with a renderer. It might be a bonus gift to a renderer but is in no way coupled to a render engine and therefore the "materials" argument doesn't count imho. And speed makes 80% of the render engine when you render animations. Cause 15min at 30 fps need over 20000 frames and I really don't buy time on a render farm and want to render that thing over night on my PC. Would I accept a 2 hour rendertime if the quality of the images would be superiour? The quality cannot be superiour enough so that I would tolerate 2h of rendertime. I what spheres are you living that a 2 hour rendertime per frame is acceptable time? WHAT THE HELL? I kick every renderengine from my PC that is not capable to render an animation frame with acceptable quality in max. 30 seconds (incl. denoising). WTF ARE YOU EVEN TALKING ABOUT? The Rendertime PER frame at PIXAR for example lies between 3 and 5 minutes!!! For Toy Story 1 Pixar accepted NO rendertime above 3min per Frame.

[markerwinargenti]

Octane's defaults are not even close to usable settings. Otoy does not do a lot of default setups in its tools. It's weird but a fact.