First of all, I did this research for myself. I hope it will be useful for anyone who looks for information about the topic.
As I need a subject for testing, I prepared a simple set up with Earthquake model from ZBrush. I unwrapped UV’s and export a high poly mesh as FBX file. Whole scene contains more than 3.153.000 polygons and file size is 305 MB.
I did it that way because I want to import same FBX file for each 3D DCC/Render engine.
I use same set up for every Render engine with it’s own standart material and quad lights which are positioned exact same xyz.
For obvious reasons I do not try to get out exact same final render at the end also do not want to spend time for reach better renders.
Anyone could achieve shorter render times or better renders with own render settings or own tricks.
But this is not my target for this research. I tend to simulate when a user fist time use a renderer what will be first impression.
First I rendered out via Redshift. It's default render settings as CPU renderer and as GPU renderer on latest C4D version.
( Redshift's default render settings Unified Sampling is off ).
Than I build up the scene with Arnold Renderer and also rendered out with default settings. So this gave me an idea how far can Redshift go as CPU renderer.
Most interesting thing is
Redshift GPU rendering 00:12 seconds and
Arnold CPU rendering 00:13 seconds. They had equal render times for this simple scene. Sure there could be different scenarios with different scene structures and results could vary.
Than I decided to feed them with more polygons. I duplicate Earthquake 12 times and repositioned the lights for both scenes.
As you can see from memory tab Redshift demands nearly double amount of memory from system.
This shows me if I decided to use CPU rendering on AS Mx Arnold could provide reliable and easy solution.
Indeed GPU rendering is way faster but sometimes for uniqe/high memory demand scenes you had to be use CPU renderer as a life saver. Also Arnold has got some special abilities/shaders or workflows.
Also I imported single Earthquake scene in to Blender and set up scene with Blenders own shader and quad lights. Rendered out Blender's Default Cycles render settings.
Blender is not consistent for every single render time. Sometimes there were %40 differences for every single render. So I rendered out scene 5 different times. This results are the best render times I could achieved.
A few render ( Cycles GPU/Metal/Full Kernel Settings ) ends up over 34 seconds. On the other hand CPU rendering is very consistent and render time differences were only %5.
What I get from this research for myself is : ***Redshift is fastest and reliable GPU renderer on AS M1 Ultra.
Arnold is the most consistent and quite fast renderer on AS M1 Ultra.
I can not add V-Ray or Corona to this multiple comparison test because when you download V-Ray Demo everything works great but when your Demo period is over it messes up whole C4D and C4D plugins. It has to be removed from evert directory/folder or subsystem otherwise C4D will not start up. I have experienced this on Mac and PC same time.
As anyone can understand Blender is way behind on that subject. I expected better results from Blender but turns out my feeling was completely wrong. Blender's own Demo Scenes are fine internally. I never seen a correct converted Blender Demo Scene via other 3D DCC.
Last Blender Demo Secene is blender_35_splash_nicole_morena. M1 Ultra 48 GPU rendered this scene 00:14 seconds. I think M2 Max 38 GPU could achieve a result around 00:10 seconds.
Scene link :
https://mirrors.ocf.berkeley.edu/blender/demo/splash/blender_35_splash_nicole_morena.blend
That's all for now
*** I am going to share Redshift v.s. Octane next
