MoonRay benchmarks

[BrianHanke]

Here are some simple test scenes rendered with MoonRay in Houdini 19.5.534 on CentOS 7.

The PC is an old 6-core Intel with 32 GB RAM. (Didn't want to risk installing Linux on a newer machine, especially when I wasn't even sure MoonRay would work at all.)

My main renderer is Arnold, so in these shootouts I always try to match look and noise levels to it. I've tested many other renderers as well and I'm including those times in the graphs below. I'm not necessarily an expert in getting the best out of each one, so take the numbers only for a general sense of what to expect.

The main outlier here is the SSS time from MoonRay. As you can see in the image below, MoonRay has a very different "style" of random walk compared to Arnold. A big part of that time difference likely comes down to what appears to be a higher quality result. Arnold still looks beautiful, of course, but it's a different flavor for sure.

Image comparisons (MoonRay on left, Arnold on right - click for full size):

The graphs below show relative render times in the same scenes (Cycles in GPU mode). I also added times using the brand spanking new RenderMan AI denoiser. It's a bit unfair since you could denoise the other renderers too, but the RMan one is so incredibly good that I doubt anyone will use RMan without it from now on.