Cycles has come a long way since we first saw that super cool train demo from Brecht back in 2011, but how does it compare to other path tracing renderers available today? Well in this post, I put cycles to the test against 5 other render engines that can be used with Blender:

Naturally, it's not easy to compare all the renderers fairly, so here's how I did it:

Testing Process

All the rendering was done using CPU rendering, on an Intel i7 3770 in a desktop with 12 GB of RAM and Windows 7. For Octane, a purely GPU renderer, an nvidia GTX 650 was used (*it performs very similarly to the Intel i7 3770).

I started by doing simple tests with cubes and monkeys, comparing materials and lighting between each renderer and finding out where the terminology differed.

Then I gathered all the information that I could from the official documentation, forums, YouTube videos, etc, and worked out which rendering algorithms from each engine would work the best in different situations.

Once I was confident enough, I started to adapt three scenes for the comparison: a car render, an interior, and a scene from a short film. I jumped randomly between each renderer and slowly narrowed down which options were better suited for each scene.

All in all, it was a bit more than 3 months of testing... and believe me, it was fun.

But before I get to the actual testing, here are a few things you should know about using them with Blender:

Price and Blender Integration