Mental Ray Benchmarks vs. VRay?

[ivon]

Hi;
does anyone know of any direct properly performed benchmarks between mental ray & vray rendering/features. Most places seem to have all the usual opinions, but has any mag' or website ever done a apples for apples kind of comparo' test for speed, quality, features, stability???etc

Im SURE this could be very helpful in a lot of ways....!
cheers
Ivon

[Remydrh]

The only real way to do apples to apples is to run one yourself in most cases. There is a Vray for Maya forthcoming if you use that package but the Beta lacks some options Vray for Max has.

However, there are more things to look at beyond just performance. There's cost and the ability to develop the software (writing shaders, etc) that are important to look at.

Beyond that, if you are really just interested in the performance, you probably notice that different jobs require different things from the renderer where one may perform better than the other so it's rarely cut and dry. I find Vray has exceptionally fast indirect lighting options, but the motion blur doesn't perform well against a rasterizer. You'll also find a direct comparison becomes even more complex when you understand that each system also optimizes based on their shading choices. The mia_material and the Vraymtl are similar but Vray also has more changes under the hood when using the DMC sampler that may override the shader (mental ray has some similar things but not to this extent it seems). A direct comparison would probably reveal very little and using every optimization available would potentially muddy the waters even more. The main reason being a "sphere on a plane" example would not be sufficient. You would need a pretty complex scene to truly see the differences and with that complexity comes all the setup involved.

I tend to prefer mental ray because I have the option of the rasterizer and the benefits that come with it, but that's because I find myself doing work that benefits from it most often (motion blur).