Cycles performance vs blender

Rendering
1

Hi

I’ve been meaning to give blender a go. I periodically test it every year or so to see if it is any more intuitive. It always was a hugely frustrating app because it was so obviously incredibly powerful but it’s UI was completely alien to me. Everything seemed to work in a sufficiently different way to any other app I’d used that it was just too painful.

It seems that things have improved.

Anyway, the reason for this post is that I’ve noticed Cycles is far faster in blender than in Rhino v7. I appreciate that it’s been integrated in blender for years longer. But, I was wondering if there are any other more fundamental reasons why performance is so much better? Is it a question of iterative optimisations, or is Cycles (raytrace) in Rhino just inherently slower due to compromises that have had to be made to integrate it?

I made some screen grab videos showing it, but they are far too big to upload here. Suffice to say that blender is many times faster.

2

To add a bit more science to this. On a similar view, blender took 8 seconds to get to 5 passes. Rhino v7 Mac took 100 seconds.

Whilst in cycles mode in blender, the viewport remained fully responsive and updated rapidly, albeit very grainy initially. Rhino viewport is incredibly sluggish whenever raytrace is enabled with a model of any complexity.

Often raytrace fails to update to properly reflect the altered view: for example, rotate a model and rendered view mode becomes active as the live view mode whilst navigating. You then stop and the previous cycles view reappears.

Perhaps this is specific to rhino on Mac?

3

GPU issues perhaps?

4

There are indeed differences, and big compromises.

You can always check here to see what I am working on or will be working on. As you can see performance issues are currently in progress.

5

Thanks, I had a look through.

There aren’t many that are tagged as ‘performance’ issues. Are there some that might not be labelled as performance that when fixed you think will increase the performance to be closer to blender?

If not, I wonder what it is that allows blender to be so much quicker than rhino?

6

As part of RH-59029 Cycles: implement Rhino procedurals I’ll be reordering node type enum and cutting out any of the nodes we don’t use at all. This will gain a fair bit of performance.

Further on the Mac there is currently no GPU support, along with PixelSize. When those get back in one way or another you’ll see performance improvement there too.

7

I think that you track item is not listed publicly. But they all sound promising. Even at half the speed of blender it would be a huge improvement.