3delight slower than MR?

[Hirazi Blue]

On my new computer I am running some simple render tests.
On my previous computer 3Delight always rendered way faster than Mental Ray ever did, but on my new computer with the latest free 3delight version, 3delight has become rather sluggish and is markedly slower relative to Mental Ray. What could be the explanation for this? I am talking about the relative speed difference between 3delight and Mental Ray, not the absolute speed difference between my previous computer and my current one.
Should I finally abandon 3delight completely in favor of Mental Ray?


edit: falling back to 3delight 4.0.12 instead of 4.0.50 does seem to improve the situation a little. So maybe 4.0.50 is a bit slow?
Was there a free version between 4.0.12 and 4.0.50 I might have missed and if so, could someone please provide me with that one?

[Mathaeus]

Up to 4.0.12 (don't know for newer), REYES performance was pretty much equal. Path tracing was faster than introduction with 3.3 or something. Regarding scene settings, always working method to slow down the render, it was too long displacement bound, Geometry Approximation > Displacement > Max. Displ. should be just a bit longer than result of shader. And of course any kind of ray - tracing together with REYES, here 3Delight never beat MR completely, imho.
Don't know that much about 3dl path - tracing, only I'm pretty sure that 3delight material should be slower than some SI standard shader, simply because it introduces a better/slower MIS sampling ratio.

P.S. of course it worth to checkout how many cores are used.

[Hirazi Blue]

P.S. of course it worth to checkout how many cores are used.

Is there a way to influence how many cores are actually used by the renderers,
I always thought this was done "automagically"...

[forton]

In arnold you can choose between the number of cores or "automagically".

[Mathaeus]

P.S. of course it worth to checkout how many cores are used.

Is there a way to influence how many cores are actually used by the renderers,
I always thought this was done "automagically"...

I was thinking of case, if machine have more cores than allowed by 3dlight version. For less, 'Performance' option in 3delight render settings ( have to admit, never tried less than default maximum).
For 'going down' in middle of rendering on single machine, let's say you suddenly want to do something else , with nice response of machine, RMB on XSI.exe in Windows Task Manager, ''Set Affinity''.

By the way, my very personal main reason for using 3dl for everyday task, over MR, all that in XSI 7.01 world, it was stability - once I sow first pixel of first frame, I was pretty sure that 3dl will do last pixel of last frame - instead of finding the lovely MR message about fatal error, just few minutes after I left him alone.

[FXDude]

Pathtracing has been made the new default (favoring quality and easy setup over performace) not long after it was introduced, and not unlike like Arnold (the fastest CPU path tracer) rendering starts very fast, and chunky previews are zippy enough to see what happenin, yet final render is way slower than MR (by some 3x) and so is 3DL, which is slightly slower than Arnie for path tracing, yet is still considered an extremely fast path tracer..

Because path tracing in MR, Maxwell, and pretty much anything else can literally go in the 8-16h/frame for even simple scenes.

You can check your task manager if it's 50 or 100%, and if not using 8 cores, I beleive you can get the 8 core if you explicitly ask for it.

cheers,