As I now have three PCs at home, I made tests to compare their render speeds in both Vue and Bryce.
Benchmark setups
Both tests were made with a very similar scene, using the same 2048 pixels terrain made in Geocontrol 2. The renders themselves were, however, very different.
Both scenes were rendered at the same size : 1000*600 pixels. The benchmarks were made on three different computers :
- A quad core desktop that was tested with and without overclocking
- A dual core Athlon desktop
- A dual core Centrino laptop
Bryce benchmark
The Bryce scene had an IBL lighting and was rendered with superfine antialiasing.
| Computer | CPU | Clock speed | Render time |
Gain on the laptop |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Desktop 1 (oc) | Core 2 Quad Q9450 | 4 x 3.2 GHz |
17'15" |
66% |
| Desktop 1 |
Core 2 Quad Q9450 |
4 x 2.66 GHz | 20'12" |
60% |
| Desktop 2 |
Athlon 64X2 4600+ | 2 x 2.4 GHz |
34'42" |
31% |
| Toshiba laptop |
Centrino Duo T2300 |
2 x 1.66 GHz |
50'01" |
Bryce does not seem to use all the cores in any configuration. With Dual cores, both are used unequally, but not fully. With the Quad core only two cores are used. In both cases, Bryce uses only 50% of the available computing power. However, the Quad core renders the scene in less than half the time of the Centrino based laptop.
Vue benchmark
The Vue scene uses a spectral atmosphere with Global illumination.
| Computer | CPU | Clock speed |
Render time |
Gain on the Laptop |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Desktop 1 (oc) | Core 2 Quad Q9450 | 4 x 3.2 GHz |
32'03" |
76% |
| Desktop 1 |
Core 2 Quad Q9450 |
4 x 2.66 GHz | 36'22" |
73% |
| Desktop 2 | Athlon 64X2 4600+ | 2 x 2.4 GHz |
1h 42' 49" |
24% |
| Toshiba laptop | Centrino Duo T2300 |
2 x 1.66 GHz |
2h 15' 25" |
Vue uses all the cores when rendering a scene, thus the gain with the Quad Core is far more impressive. But surprisingly, the gain with the Athlon is inferior to what was observed with Bryce.
After making this benchmark scene, I made the VueMark benchmark. Here are the results.
| Computer | CPU | Clock speed |
VueMark score |
|---|---|---|---|
| Desktop 1 (oc) | Core 2 Quad Q9450 | 4 x 3.2 GHz |
688 |
| Desktop 1 |
Core 2 Quad Q9450 |
4 x 2.66 GHz | 578 |
| Desktop 2 | Athlon 64X2 4600+ | 2 x 2.4 GHz |
216 |
| Toshiba laptop | Centrino Duo T2300 |
2 x 1.66 GHz |
156 |
The gain is almost the same as with my benchmark scene except that the Athlon gains 27% on the laptop instead of 24%.
Conclusions
The gain for the Quad core is far more than I expected. This machine has a tremendous computing power. But it is nothing compared to machines based on dual Core 2 Extreme that had VueMark scores of above 1000!
