Luxcore vs rest of the world
Posted: Fri Sep 10, 2021 12:39 pm
Hi, this post is intended to do some justice to Luxcore's bidirectional rendering engine.
To that end, I've prepared a scene that is not the typical HDRI + toy car. It's not a very pretty scene, but it reveals a lot of interesting information.
It is a very easy scene to set up, without textures, (textures don't reveal much about the speed of a rendering engine), so that everyone can repeat the test effortlessly on other rendering engines.
However it is a scene that easily represents the complexity of a modern store or bar or lounge, with shiny materials, lots of glass, reflections, and so on.
I asked the people who did the testing for two results:
First result with a very fast basic set-up, without tweaking the rendering engine
The second result with an advanced set-up, tweaking the rendering engine to get the best. No baking allowed. If there is any precalculation this should be added to the rendering time.
But since the following results were not all made by me I am not sure of their correctness. I'm only sure of the Luxcore and Maxwell Render results that I did personally. So I really appreciate any corrections from you guys. On rendering engines like Vray and Maxwell I decided to publish the results only on GPU because these companies claim the unconditional speed increase on GPU compared to CPU.
As hardware I put the best hardware available today, which means the nvidia 3090 and the Ryzen 3990, neither of which I own nor the people who did the testing. I simply scaled the result based on the performance gap between the hardware used and the results of official benchmarks on similar rendering engines. This is one of the benchamark pages I used: https://www.cgdirector.com/blender-benc ... ed-scores/
For example if the test in Vray was done on a 2060, to get the approximate render time on the 3090, I divided it by 3.6, which is the speed multiplier I re-encountered.
I know it's not normal to do it this way but I did it because it makes everything more intelligible.
Here the results:
Luxcore Bidir on Ryzen 3990x
Basic set-up and advanced set-up - 8 minutes
Luxcore GPU Nvidia 3090
Advanced set-up - 2 minutes (is not the final one) Light emitting objects had to be replaced by blender lights.
Cycles GPU Nvidia 3090 -
Advanced set-up - 2 minutes and 15 seconds Light emitting objects had to be replaced by blender lights.
Corona 7 on Ryzen 3990x
Basic set-up - 11 minutes
Advanced set-up - 16 minutes
Vray RT on Nvidia 3090
Basic set-up - 11 minutes
Advanced set-up - 16 minutes Light emitting objects had to be replaced by Vray lights.
Maxwell Render 5.2 on Nvidia 3090
Basic set-up and advanced set-up 26 minutes
Lumion on Nvidia 3090
Advanced set-up - 10 seconds Light emitting objects had to be replaced by Lumion lights.
White balance applied to all images in post.
Following are the settings to replicate the tests:
Camera position: 5,0,1.2
Camera target: towards the opposite wall
Camera angle
Material and lighting description on the OBJ's layers.
Lux bidir has 24 light bounces, 256 ray bounces.
blender file https://drive.google.com/file/d/1I_qg7p ... sp=sharing
fbx file https://drive.google.com/file/d/1eIYmd_ ... sp=sharing
To that end, I've prepared a scene that is not the typical HDRI + toy car. It's not a very pretty scene, but it reveals a lot of interesting information.
It is a very easy scene to set up, without textures, (textures don't reveal much about the speed of a rendering engine), so that everyone can repeat the test effortlessly on other rendering engines.
However it is a scene that easily represents the complexity of a modern store or bar or lounge, with shiny materials, lots of glass, reflections, and so on.
I asked the people who did the testing for two results:
First result with a very fast basic set-up, without tweaking the rendering engine
The second result with an advanced set-up, tweaking the rendering engine to get the best. No baking allowed. If there is any precalculation this should be added to the rendering time.
But since the following results were not all made by me I am not sure of their correctness. I'm only sure of the Luxcore and Maxwell Render results that I did personally. So I really appreciate any corrections from you guys. On rendering engines like Vray and Maxwell I decided to publish the results only on GPU because these companies claim the unconditional speed increase on GPU compared to CPU.
As hardware I put the best hardware available today, which means the nvidia 3090 and the Ryzen 3990, neither of which I own nor the people who did the testing. I simply scaled the result based on the performance gap between the hardware used and the results of official benchmarks on similar rendering engines. This is one of the benchamark pages I used: https://www.cgdirector.com/blender-benc ... ed-scores/
For example if the test in Vray was done on a 2060, to get the approximate render time on the 3090, I divided it by 3.6, which is the speed multiplier I re-encountered.
I know it's not normal to do it this way but I did it because it makes everything more intelligible.
Here the results:
Luxcore Bidir on Ryzen 3990x
Basic set-up and advanced set-up - 8 minutes
Luxcore GPU Nvidia 3090
Advanced set-up - 2 minutes (is not the final one) Light emitting objects had to be replaced by blender lights.
Cycles GPU Nvidia 3090 -
Advanced set-up - 2 minutes and 15 seconds Light emitting objects had to be replaced by blender lights.
Corona 7 on Ryzen 3990x
Basic set-up - 11 minutes
Advanced set-up - 16 minutes
Vray RT on Nvidia 3090
Basic set-up - 11 minutes
Advanced set-up - 16 minutes Light emitting objects had to be replaced by Vray lights.
Maxwell Render 5.2 on Nvidia 3090
Basic set-up and advanced set-up 26 minutes
Lumion on Nvidia 3090
Advanced set-up - 10 seconds Light emitting objects had to be replaced by Lumion lights.
White balance applied to all images in post.
Following are the settings to replicate the tests:
Camera position: 5,0,1.2
Camera target: towards the opposite wall
Camera angle
Material and lighting description on the OBJ's layers.
Lux bidir has 24 light bounces, 256 ray bounces.
blender file https://drive.google.com/file/d/1I_qg7p ... sp=sharing
fbx file https://drive.google.com/file/d/1eIYmd_ ... sp=sharing