[Maxer]

I as well as everyone on this forum am very happy that we've been given more power with which to work with Maxwell. We are however still unable to produce high resolution images within what I think is a reasonable time (less than 15 hours). My question and wish is can we expect render times to decrease as dramatically as they did with the beta version and will we be able to produce high resolution images in a reasonable amount of time before the end of the beta period?

[Jeff Tamagini]

I agree with you on this one Maxer. I have a image that I have cooking set to 100 hours and the longer I tell it to render the slower the samples increase so they keep coming out at the same quality despite going from 24 hrs to 48 hrs to 100 hrs. I am extremely satisfied with the overall speed increase however spead at upper level samples need to improve

[Maxer]

It's possible, but if Maxwell is working properly then it should choose the optimal setting for you. My concern is that were 3 months away from the final release and were still crawling along at a snails pace. Don't get me wrong I'm glad that it's faster than it was but we need to see a few more 4x increases in speed before Maxwell is going to be fast enough to use. If we don't see that then the only hope is going to be cooperative rendering which means that users with single PC's are going to have no use for Maxwell unless they have very long deadlines.

[mverta]

Give it time, guys... I'm sure there are speed increases, and we know our computers will only get faster. Remember once that Global Illumination, Raydiosity, Final Gathering, etc. were considered far too slow to ever be used in production.

On the other side, I don't know if NL has considered things like theatrical visual fx as its target client base. One-off architectural renderings and product shots seem to be the focus of the inner circle - I don't see a lot of hardcore visual effects guys in the mix. Personally, I want to see Maxwell work in the film deadline universe, so I'm here testing, watching, making suggestions, and putting the word out. But even though we're only 3 months away, we haven't even seen the Material Editor yet, so there's big stuff coming.

[Micha]

I think, one big chance to make Maxwell faster could be a noise reduction at lighting level. Maxwell know the geometry and the texures, so it could keep the edge and texture details and smooth the lighting noise only. Maybe, this is a little biased, but the great advantage of Maxwell is for me, that will be better and better with a longer rendertime and never stop.
Why not a biased average lighting per custom control? Why not link biased rendering with unbiased rendering?

[Maxer]

I'm not sure that waiting for the hardware to get faster so that you can finish a rendering is the best way to go. It's nice to know that 64 bit architecture and dual core processors are right around the corner, this will help those that can afford to immediately upgrade to these types of systems. What is still needed is a serious boost in speed and whether this comes by tweaking the code or using some kind of noise reduction system is irrelevant it just needs to work.

[Jeff Tamagini]

agreed, look at the comp specs our computer specs that we are listing between my thats listed, my alienware at work, your opteron, there is a dual G5 listed here, there isnt much in hardware upgrading that can be done from that, while there are people using maxwell on P3's and P4's, the only upgrade that I could do to see a significant difference would be to build myself a render farm, but I am not impatient either, its just that I have some rather complex scene's that I can't wait to crank out with Maxwell just not wanting to wait 100 hrs to get a decent output

[Maxer]

I wonder if it will be possable to bake lighting into a model? This would at least speed up animations.