Friday 7 May 2010

Blender Benchmarks on Windows 7 64bit



To test how good my desktop was I did a render Benchmark with Blender this past weekend and got some interesting results. The Benchmark was done using blender 2.49 and new alpha 2.5.2 both found on the download page at the blender 3D website. I wanted to know what my new PC will tell me about blender and its performance so here is a test.

Desktop Configuration:
  • Dell Studio XPS 9000
  • Intel® Core™ i7-920 processor(8MB L3 Cache, 2.66GHz) X58 Architecture
  • 12GB DDR3 SDRAM AT 1066MHZ-6X2GB,
  • NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 260,RIOS
  • 1.5TB SERIAL ATA 2, 7200 RPM,DIM,X
  • Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit
Blender File was taken from http://www.eofw.org/bench/
Blender Version 2.49 64 bit build at http://www.blender.org/download/get-blender/
Blender Version 2.5.2 64 bit build at http://www.blender.org/download/get-25-alpha/

The Render settings are as per the blend file states. Then I did rendering with 4 CPU threads and with Full 8 Threads of my CPU.
Here are the results in the Table and Chart for both blender 2.49 and 2.5.2.




Render Times
CPU Threads
2.49
(hh:mm:ss.00)
2.5.2
(hh:mm:ss.00)
1
00:02:05.0
00:00:54.3
4
00:00:40.7
00:00:17.2
8
00:00:26.7
00:00:12.0


Blender Benchmark
 
The table the and charts show 2.5.2 takes less time to render the same file with defaults or with added CPU Threads in rendering. Good news but how does the image rendered look like? Well, see for yourself below.

Rendered in Blender 3D 2.49
blender 2.49 64bit render benchmark

Rendered in Blender 3D 2.5.2
blender 2.52 64bit render benchmark

2.5.2 gives user better results than 2.49. It seems that the quality is similar to what we can get if you used LuxRender or Yafaray. Does that mean we no longer need install external renderers? Not quite actually as rendering goes it is not the only 3D aspect that blender does therefore it is not a complete solution as a good one. The external renderers give more options and give you results that can far exceed what blender can do since they are focused on rendering purely. So I am looking forward to when we get the Stable version of blender.

23 comments:

  1. "It seems that the quality is similar to what we can get if you used LuxRender or Yafaray. Does that mean we no longer need install external renderers? "

    No, these words means that you don't know what Blender Raytracing and external renderers can do or not.

    External renderers are still needed to obtain caustics.

    ReplyDelete
  2. It's a matter of trade offs. Blender's internal renderer supports hair and particle rendering. most of the external renderers don't. it's therefore on a project by project basis that renderer choice is made. I don't know if 2.5 will have the ability to select renderer per render layer like for example maya does but it's a good thing in itself to know that blender is getting better.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous...

    "No, these words means that you don't know what Blender Raytracing and external renderers can do or not."

    Your words mean you don't know how to read to the end of a post.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I understand and agree with how blender works and external renderers work, which is why I said similar and not identical. I did mention that external renderers provide more options I just did not specify what you would use that for. I think that would be different post about rendering pertaining to the render be it blender or luxrenderer or yafaray. I am not implying that blenders rendering and other rendering is identical, it is not like you pointed out. All I wanted to do was point that out the good work blender foundation and the community is doing.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Nathan Williams9 May 2010 at 05:21

    Thanks for doing the tests and posting the results. Very interesting.
    Is that version of blender fully 64bit enabled?


    Anonymous:
    > No, these words means that you don't know what Blender Raytracing and external renderers can do or not.

    Which is what the author concluded. So hold off on the rude comments - particularly if you're too gutless to post under your own name.

    ReplyDelete
  6. @Nathan Williams

    Yes I used the 64 bit builds with the default settings. I only changed the setting for CPU threads.

    ReplyDelete
  7. I believe the different looking between 2.49 & 2.5 is due to linear workflow implemented in 2.5 (color managment). if you try to uncheck color management do you get the same result as 2.49 ?

    ReplyDelete
  8. I have had the same settings for both versions of blender with color management uncheck. for the whole settings check out the blend file for the benchmark at http://www.eofw.org/bench/

    ReplyDelete
  9. My Phenom X2 965 renders in 10 seconds and was much much cheaper than yours.

    ReplyDelete
  10. Phenom II X4 965 I mean above.

    ReplyDelete
  11. Hi Elephantatech,
    Thanks for sharing this information.

    And everyone here, please don't argue about Blender's renderer.
    Because we all sure:
    Blender's just got better.

    I'm loving it.

    ReplyDelete
  12. that is great that your Phenom X2 965 pc gives faster results. I did not buy my computer just for that I have a long term plan with upgrades on my pc so I bought the one what offers the triple channel and x58 architecture. This will then just need me to upgrade my CPU and my hdd for a solid state one in 3 to 4 year. But that's what suites me if the phenom x2 works for you great.

    ReplyDelete
  13. Here is render of same test.blend rendered with Luxrender 0.7 RC2. Environment is sky, so that is why it is a bit blueish. Of course render time is much longer, about 1 hour. But I have patient for good image. And also, there is for sure use for Blender internal renderer too. I use it very often. Render you can find here: http://www.kuvapuisto.fi/image/test.png

    ReplyDelete
  14. @Kuvapuisto

    sweet man that was awesome render. That is was I am talking about when external renderers take the whole render to a new level. Which version of blender did you use?

    ReplyDelete
  15. Also Luxrender 0.8 will have full support for Open CL rendering which will accelerate Luxrender considerably and according to the Luxrender people version 0.8 will be available before the end of this year and this is something that the internal Blender renderer can't do yet.

    Luxrender 0.8 will be able to use available CPU power, GPU power and even more power through additional networked PCs all combined to render a single frame if you want to.

    Anyway, as far as I know there are no plans to do GPU computing acceleration in the near future with the Blender internal renderer as with Luxrender but later on who knows? A lot of renderers are switching to GPU processing and several others are being created that are designed to take advantage of GPU computing from the get go.

    ReplyDelete
  16. I forgot to mention that Luxrender 0.8 will also be able to use the available GPU power in the additional networked computers to finish that single frame so it will use your CPU cores, your GPU cores and the CPU and GPU cores of other networked computers in combination, now that is the way a renderer should work for single frames.

    ReplyDelete
  17. @Elephantatech

    I used Blender 2.49b.

    ReplyDelete
  18. Always nice with benchmarks in demanding applications like this, and I believe your figures are accurate.

    Still I gotta side with the "choir" of KJHBKJH about "quality being similar to what we can get if you used LuxRender or Yafaray". It's not that blender has a fairly competent rendering engine, with several unique advantages over the available alternatives. It's the fundamental misunderstanding of rendering quality, like when any sound reproduction that's free of major pops and hiss is called "CD quality".

    The only difference between the 2.49 and 2.5 image I can see is different gamma. Which is probably the sole explanation, because Blender isn't supposed to introduce new features in an "old" scene unless you explicitly activate those. And this is the big misconception here, that each new release of Blender will magically make your images look "better" without any changes to the scene. It may reduce rendering time however, as shown in this test.

    To obivate Luxrender, Blender needs several features which aren't currently available (or less versatile), nor evident in this test scene anyway:

    * physcial depth of field & motion blur
    * deep indirect lighting
    * spectral refraction
    * caustics
    * the awesome light group system in Luxrender
    * OpenCL acceleration (which is yet to come in LR, but still...)

    Blender's renderer has a couple of great unique options: particles, render layers, edges, wireframes, the general ability to disable anything you don't need to boost speed. Yes, speed, Blender is way faster than Luxrender in most cases - the tradeoff being photorealism, mostly.

    I don't even think Blender is going in the direction of "replacing" Luxrender, especially with the great integration using luxblend. Which means that I'm not criticizing blender's renderer, I just think comparing it to Luxrender in the way above is unfair.

    ReplyDelete
  19. @Aru

    Blender has depth of field ( http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-243/composite-defocus/ ) and motion blur ( http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-242/vector-blur/ ) through use of the compositor. Maybe it's not the same as Luxrender, but still, don't discount the compositor. :)

    ReplyDelete
  20. @Aru

    The settings were same as it was set by the blend file found at http://www.eofw.org/bench/. As far as I know blend file settings don't change automatically and you confirm that I would have to change the setting explicitly, which I did for the CPU threads. and Most of what you are saying is true that blender will not replace luxrender or any external render which I believe I mentioned on my post "The external renderers give more options and give you results that can far exceed what blender can do since they are focused on rendering purely."

    ReplyDelete
  21. I thought blender used Yafaray for rendering

    ReplyDelete
  22. seriously fast PC you have there. I've been struggling with whether to go x6 phenom or the i7 route, what made up your mind?

    ReplyDelete
  23. @Anonymous blender is using yafaray engine sort of not complete yet. They are still working in as far as I know they are in the process of making improvements. It will be slow but I know they will deliver awesomeness.

    @cool desktop backgrounds - Think how you want things to work for you. If you want everythign the greatest with price tag go with the higher models of i7. If you want best bang for the buck x6 phenom to go. What I want to do is upgrade my processor when the higher models for i7 come down in prices that what I don't have spend another one or two thousand dollars and just spend another 600 dollars instead. What you want is something that does your work and when you need to replace it due to malfunction then you can afford to do it. Think Support terms warranty. I went that way since it has been a long time since I opened a machine outside the early pentium 4 pc. It is easier to think it may not be easy to actually do.

    ReplyDelete