In my application I use Blender's Internal rendering engine (headless mode) to render quick mock-ups of various items. BI yields plenty quality, however speed is essential (it's a web app) and I wish it was faster.
I wanted to try out Eevee so I ported one of my scenes to 2.80, fixed the textures & lighting and tried rendering the scene.
The scene is very simple - two objects with a basic texture material and three (!) light sources. It renders this:
My 2.79 Blender Internal environment is run on an 8-core (2.7 GHz Intel Xeon® Platinum 8168) 16G RAM compute-optimized VM.
I tested 2.80 Eevee on a Tesla K80 6-core 56G RAM VM, which is comparable in price.
It seems that Eevee is slightly faster than BI. The difference is even more significant when multiple clients are rendering in parallel.
Unfortunately, everyone keeps comparing Eevee to Cycles and I haven't been able to find any relevant data on Eevee vs BI. My questions are thus:
- Would one expect Eevee to be faster than BI in general? If not, under what circumstances would BI be faster?
- Which one has more potential for optimization (e.g. reducing samples vs optimizing tile size, etc.)?
I appreciate that there are many factors in play, especially when it comes to hardware. Hopefully that does not make this question too broad.
EDIT
My scenes are here:
- Blender 2.79b (BI): http://www.filedropper.com/phone-279b
- Blender 2.81 (Eevee): http://www.filedropper.com/phone-280
I don't really have any specific requirements... Here's what I am thinking:
- The final result should not look like it's from Counter Strike 1.6. This is what I have now, and it's fine: http://www.filedropper.com/phone_2 (yes, I am stitching two images together)
- Potential load is not yet known, but I might want to plan for maybe 100s of people rendering at the same time...