wendyvainity posted at 4:37PM Sun, 13 June 2021 - #4421210

it's only 100 samples on that frame as I am rendering an animation so yes noisy, and I did enable the denoiser, unlike DAZ iray Octane will not use the CPU to load the geometry at all and it is pretty much maxing my 980Ti with that scene, this is OR4Carrara plugin not the DAZ one. The Carrara render doesn't have those noise issues as well as being faster so definitely my preferred choice for this scene.

Yes, it will definitely be faster for a number of reasons. The first is that your GPU isn't able to handle all the scene and is probably offloading a lot of it to your CPU, which will be slower than if your CPU is taking all the load to begin with. I don't know which version of Octane, but like I mentioned, newer versions will not work as well with older GPU cards because the architecture of the card is different. Lastly, we can see that the Carrara version is not nearly as complex or accurate in the shadows or realism. Octane will always try to make the most realistic lighting for the scene possible. When you have a completely enclosed scene, lit by only a bunch of emission lights, then It's going to try to bounce millions of light rays around the scene to create more ambient light. This will take TONS more processing power. Carrara is obviously not even attempting to do that. The carrara scene appears to be flat and lit much more like a first or second gen gaming engine, except for some raytracing. So I guess it depends on the look you are happy with, because they certainly look like two completely different scenes.

I feel like if you really cranked up the render settings and set up the Carrara scene to render with the same look and quality of the Octane scene, then render times would tend to even out. Then again, it would depend on your GPU for Octane. Your 980 ti would be good in earlier versions of Octane, but not so much the newer versions. You'd need a card that had much larger VRAM capacity in order to load all the textures and geometry into the GPU.

So yea, without a GPU upgrade, and without try to actually make the scenes look exactly the same in both engine, the Carrara version will always render faster.