https://i.ytimg.com/vi/PxI9jYOLMcU/hqdefault.jpg
Maya 2018.2 with Arnold 5
Blender 2.79 Daily Build
DELL XPS 15 9560
16 GB RAM
i7-7700HQ @ 2.80 GHz (4 cores / 8 proc)
GTX 1050 (4 GB)
Latest Win 10 / latest Nvidia driver
The still life scene was originally set up in Blender 2.79 with photogrammetry models by Oliver Harries:
https://www.artstation.com/olyandros
https://gumroad.com/l/CZNAS
https://oliverharries.de
Special thanks to Oliver Harries for these fantastic free and very detailed models.
All models will use a color, roughness and normal map. All maps were scaled down from 8K to 2K for this test.
Lighting with one High Dynamic Range image.
The Kiwi’s fur has been converted into meshes for this test and used for both scenes.
Both scenes will use Physically Based Rendering by aiStandard (Arnold) and Principled (Cycles) and 64 samples for Camera (AA) and all other passes (Branched Path Tracing in Blender).
The video shows the different render times in real time.
Top left: ARNOLD CPU
Top right: Cycles CPU
Bottom left: Cycles GPU
Bottom right: Cycles Hybrid (CPU + GPU)
Render time might be affected by recoding with OBS Studio.
Conclusion:
In this example ARNOLD and CYCLES are very equal in CPU render time and quality. CYCLES is up to 20% faster. ARNOLD has less noise especially in the darker parts. The Principled shader in CYCLES is using Multiscatter GGX what will result some areas with brighter highlights. ARNOLD just supports GGX. Some parts like the wooden bowl will be lighter. Beside those differences the quality is very similar.
source
14 responses to “Research ARNOLD vs. CYCLES”
I think that people are missing the point and are just looking at the fastest.
By a large margin did Arnold handle the shading in a much more close to real life way.
Look at the kiwi. It looks so much more realistic and that is not something easy fixable to do in Cycles.
Both have their strengths and weaknesses. But for commercial work where color and realism are key I would pick Arnold.
What Arnold settings are you using? Samples, Ray depth, etc.
VERY IMPORTANT for CYCLES GPU: Set cluster size to 256*256 pixels, it is much much faster than default !
Is it just me or does arnold change the colors of things?
Sadly, hybrid isn't in the latest stable blender release :<
I tested it in it's firsts daily builds tho, it crashed a few time back then but it was faster ♥
Hello there. Do you mind sharing the already setup scene (not models) in order to make a comparisson in appleseed 1.9 render? Or if you can do it, it'd be great!
GPU could be much faster if you used bigger tiles.
same scene in redshift please ? 😀
Now do a test with Redshift and watch as it blows all these away 🙂
Fuck, this is disturbing. I was planning on purchasing Arnold (for Maya). You saved me, man.
Nice comparison. For the next test, you should try a few dozen light sources and really high ray depth and glass materials.
I'm sure you have plenty to do, but I've heard Arnold is at it's best (compared to other renderers) with multiple light sources, in fact a lot of light sources (I've heard comments about hundreds or thousands in some interview with someone working on a feature film). Food for thought, hopefully. Naturally, I'm on team Cycles, given that I use Blender as well as Cycles for C4D.
Nice comparison. Did you use the same ammount of GI bounces? Also you wrote Arnold had less noise, so wouldn't it be more accurate to compare the Rendertimes not after a fixed number of
samples, but after reaching a fixed ammount of noise? Maybe the high
frequencies in the image could be measured to check this (or maybe you can't and have to guess it – I don't know any tools to do this).
Hi, thanks for the test. Can you tell me how is your laptop acting in a long high GPU load? Have you experienced throttling?
Thanks in advance