Arnold vs ART (which is faster)

[Jorge.Sanchez]

Does anyone know if there are any tests out there between this two. I have not been able to find any info.

Thanks.

[madsd]

Depends what kind of scenario you want to test and what kind of quality/setup you are willing to try measure with.

There are many very important things ART can't do, so can't compare those.

Arnold gpu can resolve alias + 1 reflection ray faster than Nitrous sets alias. So Arnold is faster than the viewport on that account.

If you run Arnold GPU + OptiX denoiser against ART and you do it on a decent card you will find that ART will fall behind with quite significant lower performance, over all.

[madsd]

ART has problems delivering at the same speed as this, for example.
Attached a GIF animation of Arnold  GPU + optiX.

[Jorge.Sanchez]

I used to use Mental ray a lot back in 2017 and I'm trying to migrate to Arnold but I find it so much slower and noisier then mental ray was. I've also tried the OptiX denoiser but it swallows up 1/4" -  1/8" thick details in my interior renderings and makes them disappear.

What are the minimum settings for interior visualizations that I can get away with for speed before it starts getting too noisy?

Also does it help if I turn SSS and Volume Indirect to 0?

I've tried bumping up Camera AA to 6 and Diffuse to 3 but its so slow.

Any other tips on adjusting Adaptive and Progressive?

I read that you can speed up the rendering if you set the Low Light Threshold from the default of 0.001 to 0.01 or 0.1

(default settings)

[madsd]

I''d just make sure I was on the latest build to get optix 6.0 features.
They improved the denoiser a lot over recent iterations.

Else, not 6 Camera AA if CPU, thats overkill for sure.
Rather up the individual samples, diffuse, specular, transmission. get a balance going directly rather than using the master dial, its always expsensive to raise that one.

You can use the noice.exe build in tools to denoise quick tests and find optimal speed on all 3 accounts in junction with actual scene settings. Looking at the AOV render in realtime view, rerendering with various feature sets to trim up things.

You can load the AA_Inverse AOV and check realtime where adaptive samples focus, its going to start out as a white or bright image and then settle in middle tones down to black, all float values. You can then identify which priority the rendering is having and you can "grade" this AOV with settings to get optimal performance with adaptive sampling, where threshold is cut level and Camera AA is BOTTOM and Adaptive sampling AA is an upper roof, so you can set that to a very large number, its just stops when it reaches the end.

Here is an example of trimming up the adaptive samples with this AA_Inverse_density AOV
Looking at this AOV and knowing what grey, black and white does can help you to identify and trim sampling up around areas by either making general distribution or more contrasty. For example a big white wall normally clears fast, we can trim up around an asset that needs more samples to look good.

[Jorge.Sanchez]

Where do you can I check which version of OptiX I have?

[madsd]

If you install the latest Arnold available on the Solid Angle site and can render with GPU you know you are using the most recent version of optix.

[Fleixal]

Depends on what you're rendering. For most of my work I just use ART. For complex scenes, I use Corona—hard pass on Arnold, sorry.