Hello there,

I’m not sure how many finalRender users that hangs out here, but I give it a shot :)

I’ve been trying out fR to compare it to mental ray which I’m used to work with. So I took an older interior scene of mine and replaced all the A&D materials with fR-Architectural with the same settings. I turned of the mrSun and mrSky and assigned them as nodes in the fR render settings for Physical Sky and I turned the Physical Camera on on the camera and set the exposure. Then I set all the presets I could find to the lowest or the “Interior Fast” where it was available and I turned of AA. I’m using AdaptiveQMC as primary and HarmonicsGI secondary engine. I set GI Bounces to 3. For HarmonicsGI I lowered the Samples to 100, unchecked Pre Filter and lowered Filter Sampes down to 4 and I used the Store Direcet Light. So basically I set every setting I could imagine to very very low. But the scene still took 7 minutes to render, mental ray did it in less then 1 minute! And the quality of the mental ray render was even somewhat better… Is finalRender really 7 times slower then mental ray? It sounds unlikley!

I followed the new fR tutorials to understand it better but he basiclly does the same as I did but with higher settings.

Then I tried without Physical Sky. I used Simple Sky and replaced the Daylight System with on Directional light with fR-Raytraced Shadows, and changed the camera back to normal. This time I got it down to like 4 minutes… but still mental ray less then 1 minute…

So what am I doing wrong? I’m using fR 3.5 SP5 or 6, I don’t remember. (I did this a couple of weeks ago, but haven’t had the time to post yet.)

My computer:
i7 980, 24GB RAM, 2x GeForce GTX 590.

Cheers mates!

Hello Kristoffer,

A direct comparison like this is impossible as all renderers work a bit differently, accordingly, the used workflows have to be different.

First thing to consider are the GI bounces:  when switching to HarmonicsGI this value is not used. fR computes unlimited bounces in that mode, so light bounces until all the energy is lost. fR computes more than just 3 bounces unlike mental ray in that case :)

Hi! I am a long time fr user an to tell you the truth i am really surprised with your issue. I could have a look into your scene and try to find the problem there… If you could post both mr and fr scenes here i would take a look in them