Cycles X vs Cycles, does it really live up to the hype?

everybody seems to be going mental over cycles x which is the upcoming version complete rewrite of the cycles render engine that we get today in uh version 2.93 which is the version i've currently got open on the screen personally i can't believe it's going to be this good the developers have only been working on it for two months and to suggest that it's going to be you know people are saying it obliterates things like redshift and octane these these are the high-end gpu render engines that are just untouchable in terms of speed and to suggest that the developers can beat that in only two months of development well surely that's ridiculous so to test the render engines out i'm going to use this model that i built a few years ago for a game engine and if you want it you can download it from my website at 3d dash illusions.com uk i'll put a link in the description below as well and to celebrate the channel breaking the 2000 subscriber barrier today i've put a 75 off discount in the description below that'll be valued for the first 2003 users because that's the number of subscribers i've got today and i'll also include the advanced compositor setup for each render so that you can look at the colour grading techniques that i used and you'll be able to see how i was able to speed up the rendering by five to ten times compared to just using the denoiser in the render settings as well okay then so let's get started with the test between cycles and cycles x so first thing i'm going to choose a room the previous renders by the way were all done in standard cycles in blender 2.93 i think we'll go with the i think we'll go with the kitchen and let's go into the lighting workspace uh and don't forget we're still in cycles 2.93 this is not cycles x yet let's just bring up the render settings gpu mode and i'm currently using a gtx 1070 so it's not the greatest i've not got any denoising enabled in the viewport so let's give that a quick try and we'll just see what the performance is like so open image denoise that's the one that's in cycles x as well so it's waiting for it to calculate in there so that's not bad i mean it's pretty slow but uh one of cycles x big strengths so i've heard is that the viewport remains responsive for moving around the camera even when the open image denoiser is working so let's give that a quick try now and i'm actually moving the mouse there and it's really slow to respond and this is only in a small area i mean it's a 4k monitor but it's still quite a um a small area of the screen probably less than 1080p okay so we can see then that it's quite difficult to move the viewport around if you've got the denoiser turned on in blender 2.93 running standard cycles i'm going to test that in cycles x as i'm told that will fair a lot better but firstly i just wanted to run a few final renders so that we can find out how just how much faster cycles x is than standard cycles when it comes to final renders so i'll just go over to the compositor workspace to do the render so we'll first do a render with bucket mode and then we'll do a render with progressive refine just to make it fair on cycles x which only uses progressive refine so let's start the first bucket render going okay so that rendered in 11 minutes and 11 seconds and while we're still in 2.93 let's set progressive renderer going all right so that finished rendering in a lot longer it took nearly three times longer so 29 minutes 37 17 and also i've noticed we're getting a lot of firefly which presumably is due to progressive refine being incompatible with light clamping in the render settings okay so now what we'll do we'll get cycles x and we'll go to uh blender blender download we're going to choose to go into the experimental build so go to the bottom download blender experimental it's not one of these we've got to go into experimental branches now if you scroll right down we've got cycles x branch so click on that and it'll ask you to save it somewhere i've already downloaded it once you've downloaded it just unzip it so you get this folder and let me bring that folder up okay so we've got this branch now all you've got to do is double click on this you don't need to install it or anything and then we can open up the file all right so the first thing that i want to test is the viewport performance and that's going to the random settings we've got open image denoise turned on for the viewport i'm leaving it turned off for the render because i'd never use that in the render i always do it manually in the compositor so let's just turn this on see if it's any faster to respond and let's change cameras again so it did load a little bit quicker there camera all right so we're in this one let's see if this responds any quicker so straight away that that is actually responding if you remember before i was moving the mouse and it wasn't responding at all i had to wait several seconds between uh the denoiser kicking in i'll leave it after a second and we'll see we're getting that and now if i go back to the other camera camera one and that's working really quickly we've got no option to use bucket rendering in this so we don't need to turn on progressive it should be on uh automatically i believe but they've probably taken the option away in fact under performance yeah so there's no progressive render anymore and another big bonus for cycles x is that the viewport can actually utilize the adaptive sampling feature so that in itself will speed up the render performance in the viewport massively even if you've not got the denoiser running so let's go over to the compositor and we'll run a f12 again i noticed that the time seems to be moving a little bit sporadically obviously that's some small bug that you have to iron out i've noticed it no longer gives you the time remaining probably that's something they're going to add back in hopefully because you need to know how long you've got to play on battlefield 1 in between doing some work so this does seem to be rendering i mean it it seems to be rendering us quicker but it also seems to be cleaning up faster as well so i don't think i would even need as many samples as i used before and if you remember in the cycles in 2.93 in progressive mode we're getting an incredible amount of fireflies and that's obviously being resolved in this uh this version so this is actually quite incredible i mean look at look at the samples jumping up now before it 11 minutes in bucket rendering and 30 minutes in progressive but if you look at this we're already over a quarter of the way there probably i mean i'll be honest with you i would normally stop the render there that's that's gone beyond what i would need to render because i can always clear that up in comp in the comp i'll let it run even though it's not necessary to run any further just so we can get the end time to compare to cycles in 2.93 so it's actually finished in 5 minutes and 23 seconds approximately twice as fast as bucket rendering in normal cycles so it's gonna be six times faster than progressive in uh 2.93 that is absolutely in bonkers the amount of render time that this is cut down is just insane on an old gtx 1070 wow so this first look at cycles x is pretty impressive i've got to say especially when you consider that the developers have only been rewriting it from scratch for approximately two months so when it's finished in another i don't know four to between four and six months i think it's going to be something special without a doubt so thanks for watching don't forget if you want to grab that full scene with all the models included and all the textures and materials then head over to my website 3delusions.co.uk and i'll see you next time

Channel: 3d illusions

Views: 8,137

Keywords: blender, 3d, blender cycles, blender cycles x, cycles x blender, cycles x test, cycles x render, cycles x vs cycles, cycles vs cycles x, cycles x, blender 3.0, blender 3, blender architecture, blender building

Id: tHacBk2HA30

Length: 10min 1sec (601 seconds)

Published: Sun May 02 2021