I also want to add that the title of “Particle Deathmatch” was intended to be tongue in cheek. I imagine our next update will include such things like changing the min to 2 etc. These renderers are not as fast as Krakatoa, and getting all these things rendered so we can bring them to you takes Like I mentioned to bigboss, Chaos Group has come on board now to offer their optimizations to the current set of variables we are benchmarking for. I’m sorry if our benchmark didn’t cover specific criteria important to you, hopefully you’ll be happier with future Agreed, we have plans for future examples with high particle counts, but please be patient.

Chaos Group was just delayed in joining the bechmark, and I will post an update once they get back to me. I spoke with Vlado this morning, and we are working together to find optimizations in the same manner that we worked with the good people at Solid Angle.

We were not attempting to eliminate all noise, we wanted to see what a specific set of equivalent values would get you, and for what render cost. What we set out to find here was what you would get with a standard set of base render settings.

It just would be a different setup, with a different intended result. I look forward to the day they fix this issue as I am a long time Thinkbox supporter, and it was painful for me to have to cheat on them with my particles What you are asking for is a benchmark with a different set of goals, that doesn’t make “the render time wrong” on this one. Render speed doesn’t matter much if you cannot achieve the specific look you need to. However I have not been able to get past the shadow issues, so I had to begin exploring alternatives. Don’t get me wrong, I miss Krakatoa’s ability to load percentages of particles in the viewport for easy navigation, and it is blazing fast. I spoke to Conrad and Bobo about this at Siggraph and they said there was not a solution to this problem at the moment. The Max version has a workaround, but the Maya version does not. The main reason why we have been shying away from Krakatoa at the moment is the fact that it does not have the ability in its current release to cast shadows onto surrounding geometry.

Vray next benchmark