Archive notice: This article was originally published on October 31, 2013. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
Chen provided an initial preview of the new functions and, as a beta tester, confirmed the announced significantly improved rendering performance. According to his results, rendering time is actually reduced by a hefty 40 to 75 percent compared with version 2.4. As a downside, however, he states that the results sometimes come across as somewhat noisy.
Embree also makes rendering faster; rendering time is reduced by up to 10 percent, while image quality is not supposed to suffer. There were only positive things to report about progressive rendering as a new key feature, as well as the rather small feature, dynamic spitting of the render buffer. The Probalistic Lights function helps handle a large number of light sources.
You can read the detailed results here at CG Record or directly on Chen’s blog.
Image: Copyright ©2013, Chaos Software
