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[mverta]

Sorry, Andy... forgot to answer that.

We're a mental ray shop; have been for quite a few years now. In fact, I'll continue using mental ray until I'm sure I can swap it for Maxwell... We've done a number of time comparisons, even with Maxwell's young engine, and there's no question that you can get to a better solution faster, lighting-wise with Maxwell. When the textures are ready I think we'll be way better off.
With mental ray, even my best educated guesses, GI and FG-wise, need a ton of tweaking, and optimizing, and have all sorts of problems with flicker and noise which you know if you do GI and FG with mental ray. And you also know that you can basically forget using mr's motion blur unless you want to spend eternity in the render. We've post-processed our motion blur with lm_2Dmv and Reelsmart for a long time. And of course, even our best GI and FG renders with caustics enabled can't hold a candle to what Maxwell does with default settings right out of the box. And they don't work in mr anyway.

Since GI and FG is so noisy, flickery and time-consuming to use, we usually just bypass it. We've always had to do multiple passes instead, and fake our GI and FG with Dirtmap or some other occlusion shader and the usual RGB lighting tricks to get what we want, composite-wise.

Right now, I'm betting that 18 hours of mental ray work, all things considered, including composite, will still produce an inferior image to 18 hours of similar Maxwell rendertime. Again, assuming the materials come up to the level of flexibility we enjoy with mr.

_Mike

P.S. During my testing with the current Maxwell, I've been doing a lot of spot-work... focusing on individual pieces and specific materials, etc. I've not brought in that big, impressive huge polygon-count showpiece project that you're looking for yet. Hell, I don't even know if I COULD, yet! Comparing RC1 to mr 3.x is a totally unfair comparison at this stage, as you well know.

[daros]

I agree completly with you Mverta. Maxwell is fast even at Alpha stage.
I never experienced so short workflows, approvations and delivering times as with Maxwell Alpha 1.33. Some works are approved after one hour. Even by studios like Zaha Hadid.
We made With Maxwell since April about 20 Architectural projects.
During animation we see the most important thing... as you say, no flickering, never, even on very small detailed geometries at low sampling levels. We was saying: a miracle! ( we are in Italy). We made about 6 minutes animation. Frames ranging between 5 to 8 hours. In Lightwave we have for lower quality frames 6 to 30 hours, but with flickering even with the highest AA.
I agree, if NL give us the final 1.0 it will change the CG world.