Questions re: Iray vs Blender Cycles render engines
spyderbytes
Posts: 23
I'm on a mid-2011 iMac with an AMD Radeon HD 6770M w/ 512 MB. (Don't laugh, I just upgraded to that within the last 6 months with a windfall I received; you wouldn't want to know what I upgraded from!) So, obviously, no go on GPU Iray. So far, I haven't had a whole lot of luck with Iray CPU, either. But that's a matter for a different thread, if I can't straighten it out with some more trial and error.
What I want to know is if anyone has done any benchmarking on the speed of Iray CPU vs Cycles? Also, is one clearly superior to the other in image quality? I'm quite comfortable with my workflow in the Cycles render engine, but wonder if I would be better off in the long run making the transition to Iray. I'd love to hear all arguments pro and con.
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I think that's more about content than about render performance. For example, if you're going to buy stuff in the store that's designed for DAZ Studio, you'll then have to get it into Blender. And it's not the same materials in Iray vs. Cycles. And you'll need a separate plugin that does some of that transfer. So it's really tough to get an apples-to-apples comparison.
And the two platforms are very different. Blender has modelling and compositing and Eevee and a ton of other features that Studio doesn't. But Studio has features that Blender doesn't (ease of use with store content, etc.).
Personally I use both depending on what I need to do. But I rarely use Blender for rendering due to the difficulties I described. And I'm sure there's a whole world of difficulties if you're doing animations.
Though maybe someone has successfully moved stuff from Studio to Blender and converted materials and has some comparison numbers. That would be interesting...
Agreed. There are many other renderers that are faster and look better than Iray, but the fact that it is integrated into DS is the selling point for me. Life it to short to spend twice as much time setting up a scene and materials when i don't have to. it's why I don't import scenes and render in 3DSMax.
Thanks for the replies. I generally set up the textures by hand. Sometimes I use the .duf to Blender import plugin to give me a leg up on the process. I have the soul of a kit-basher, you see. It's been a long time since I used someone else's texture "out of the box" as it were. There's always things I want to tweak (sometimes minor, sometimes major). So creating a node and linking a texture map as I do that is no big deal. That means getting things into Blender is not really an issue to me.
I was really just looking for a head-to-head comparion of the render engines. I can accept that may not be possible; but I personally don't have an issue with posing in DS and transferring to Blender to render, if that's what will give me the best results.
Hi I have not offcially documented the numbers
But I can tell you that in ANY ,CPU only scenario, cycles will render much faster than
Iray
For example this scene of the Genesis 2 male was rendered in blender 2.79b over on my
gateway EC58 travel Laptop with a 1.3GHz Intel Pentium Dual Core SU4100 CPU
and an integrated Intel GMA4500MHD graphics chip.
Render time about 90 minutes( as expected with NO GPU)
the same scene would take at least 12 hours with IRay
based on my extrapolation of test renders in IRay of even simpler scenes.
Understand that NVDIA is a graphics hardware company that doles out the IRay render engine
as a loss leader product to foment hardware sales.
IRay will under perform dramaticly almost punitively on non NVIDIA hardware.
If you have a recent model NVIDIA GPU then stay within Daz studio
you will be fine.
Yes adjusting your shaders /materials in blender or,whatever other engine, can be tedious
but Cycles is hardware agnostic and only "cares" about your graphics hardware's technical capability.
NOT who actually manufactured it.
I suggest conducting your own tests and you will likely find that even with the time spent fiddling
with shader nodes in blender you will have a completed render with cycles on your CPU several hours before
you would with IRay on Non NVIDIA hardware.
here's some discussion and numbers
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/321746/iray-textures-shaders-in-other-render-engines
I'm not convinced you can get a real like-for-like comparison and answer this question generally. Performance will vary from scene to scene and what's in it, and depending on materials setups being used. You certainly have a lot more levers to pull to get performance out of Cycles in Blender than you do out of Iray in DS, which suggests you could get it to perform better in most scenarios if you really tried.
Just for the heck of it, here's an anecdotal comparison. One G8F with hair, lit by an HDRI only. I used the Diffeomorphic plugin to convert the scene to Blender and made no changes to the materials (I normally would do, certainly if performance is the goal).
With Nvidia GPU, 100 samples: Iray 2m07s, Cycles 2m18s.
CPU only, 100 samples: Iray 14m10s(!), Cycles 7m5s.
Conclusion (for this one scene) - Cycles wins by a street for CPU only, Iray wins narrowly for GPU only and Cycles is pretty good at using the Nvidia GPU in this instance. The more samples you use, the wider the gaps will be of course.
In the attached images, rendered on 4 yr old laptop, Iray is the slightly narrower one - both cropped to deal with the fact she is startlingly nekkid from the neck down.
Performances will vary mostly by the engine technology. If you use blender 2.79 then it's made for use with the denoiser and you can't compare just with "samples". The quality you can achieve with 100 samples in blender 2.79 is by far superior to daz studio 4.10. Not to mention that being cycles tile-based it takes much less vram so you can handle larger resolutions and bigger scenes with the same hardware. Not to mention that cycles works fine both with nvidia and ati cards. While if we use betas then the speed you can achieve with blender 2.80 using eevee is by far superior from using cycles in 2.79 or iray in 4.11. Though there's some limits in pbr.
So you see, overall daz studio can't really match with blender as far as rendering speed and/or options are concerned.
EDIT. Uh .. almost forgot .. Also not to mention that 2.80 implements out of core rendering for cycles. So you can just use your ram when vram gets short.
I don't think it's fair (or even useful) to try to compare two different renderers based solely on speed. It's like trying to compare a Ford Mustang to a Chevy Silverado (lorry for you folks across the pond). The answer might seem obvious in one scenario, but for someone who needs to drive off road, or towing a motorhome, it would be a different result.
I think the important question is can Cycles and Iray produce similar results in a reasonable amount of time? Being twice as fast doesn't matter if your output looks completely different than what it's supposed to look like.
Getting back to the OP's question, I think both engines can output similar results, with little differences in tonemapping. More importantly, if you're already comfortable using Cycles and you already own an AMD card, you might as well keep using it. Plus there's the fact that you're using a Mac, I guess you could make Nvidia/Iray work, but I don't think it'd be worth the expense. You'd be better off spending $700 for a Radeon VII. It doesn't have quite the horsepower that the 2080ti does, but it has more VRAM and faster VRAM at a 40% discount. If I get some spare time to try Blender, I'm definitely going to try to make the switch.
@wolf359 Yeah, that's pretty much what I was thinking from my more-or-less failed attempts to get Iray running CPU at all, much less efficiently. I understand DAZ's decision to hang their future on Iray from a business standpoint. Heck, I can envision myself making the same decision myself, if I were tasked with figuring out the best course from a business standpoint. But for me, as an individual customer of theirs, it seems to be a bit marginalizing. Then again, I have to realize the relatively small volume of content buying I'm able to afford, from my limited and fixed income, marginalizes me in and of itself, as well. It is what it is.
@padone Thanks for the linked discussion. Interesting read, and makes me even more certain that, in my circumstances, Blender is the best option.
@Kitsumo I personally didn't find Blender hard to learn. But then, I've worked with just about every 3d platform out there at one point or another. That eventually makes it easier to just try to figure out what's different in a new one because much of it is going to be very similar. Still, I've found the Blender docs mostly well written, and the community very friendly and helpful. I predict you'll like it if you give it a fair shot.
Thanks, everyone! We've got an interesting discussion going here!
I'll admit Iray is nice because most products just work™ right out of the box. But I still end up tweaking and adjusting things to get the look I want.
Plus I can't see myself continuing to buy Nvidia cards, not at these prices.
I might agree with you on fair, but sometimes speed is the most important factor. I picked up on the OP's use of the word 'benchmark' and interpreted it as meaning 'speed', which I think is reasonable unless some other measure is specified. The OP mentioned image quality too, but to some extent that is subjective. Looking at the 2 images I rendered, I actually think the Iray render looks better.
True if they look completely different. But Iray and Cycles tend to look pretty similar, and if I have a job involving delivering 100 images as soon as possible, each of which Iray will take 1 hour to render and Cycles 30 minutes, I can deliver this job two full days earlier using Cycles. If Iray renders would be 'better', then it comes down to a variation of the old 'Better, faster, cheaper - pick two' directive
You might want to look into aweSurface and scripted pathtracing for 3Delight. Rendertimes are roughly 4 times faster than with IRay with CPU rendering and the commercial pack comes with an IRay to awe convertion script. You can DL the shader from the freebies forums along with some other stuff (utility scripts, lights etc) and see how you like it.
https://www.daz3d.com/aweshading-kit-10-for-daz-studio
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/280441/awe-shading-kit-for-daz-studio-and-3delight-commercial/p1
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/277581/awe-surface-shader-a-new-physically-plausible-shader-for-daz-studio-and-3delight/p1
I've used Iray on a MacBook Air with 4GB ram and whatever the integrated Intel GPU was. As long as you don't mind overnight renders, it's okay. However, I had to do a ton of work to keep things going while rendering—turn off every app, including a lot of helper apps that aren't usually visible without looking at Activity Monitor. If the 512MB is system RAM, I wouldn't even contemplate using Iray. It's just not designed for computers like that.
One possible alternative, provided you don't mind paying a few bucks per render, is using a render farm. I've used Nimbix.net when I've needed/wanted a render faster than I could do sans Nvidia card and been happy.
Thanks @Sven Dullah, that looks like it has possibilities. I'll have to check into that!
@aaráribel caađo no, the 512 MB is VRAM on the GPU. CPU has 8MB, but is expandable to 32MB (which I'm saving to do).
One odd omission from the IRay render engine is motion-blurring. Cycles does this as most modern renderers do. I don't get why it is not available in Iray since they seem to handle blurring quite well with depth-of-field.
However, with your setup, it seems unlikely that you will be doing much animation, although motion-blurr in a still frame can help add drama to the image.
LOL .. That was win 95 with the very first version of Poser for Painter and some Truespace 1 in my case. When I was just a little child. Thank you for bringing me back there for a second ..
EDIT. And also the first legendary version of final fantasy in 3D on playstation 1 .. the mighty FF7 LOL. Everything really began in those magic days ..
Doh! Change those M's to G's.
My computer is old (2011), but not that old. My very first Macintosh was what was colloquially known as the "Fat Mac", with 16M of RAM as opposed to the "skinny" one with 8M. I remember wondering, when I got it, how one would ever really need that much RAM. Times change, huh?
With this setup, you're right. I used to do a considerable amount of animation in the olden days, but still really preferred doing stills. And you're also correct about that seeming a rather odd omission. Ah well... I've been using Blender for years now (can't beat the price for someone on a limited fixed budget!) and this thread isn't giving me any reasons to look back now.