Thanks a lot for your scene Julian, we are debugging it right now. We'll keep you updated.
brodie_geers wrote:
From my experience that isn't the case. Since the rendering engine only has to collect information from the object once it's also a lot faster.
Hi Brodie, you are right in the fact that with instances you just need to load the mesh once, and it has benefits, not only in the memory area but also the loading time is faster. However during render time instances are usually slower than real meshes, there are many reasons that cause this. One of them is that when you calculate intersections with instances you have to get access to the real mesh and calculate transformations that are skipped when you are rendering the main object. There are other reasons related to the way rays use navigation structures (voxelizations, bsp's etc) that are more complex to expose here. Therefore usually instances just save memory but not speed (there is an exception if the memory consumption using real objects instead instances was too high that the system run out of real memory and has to use virtual instead, the performance could dramatically drop down in that case)
I hope we can give you good news soon, thanks again for reporting this issue.
Regards,
Juan