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- The quality of the light samples drawn by each renderer. How fast do we converge to ground truth by increasing the number of samples ?
- Performance. How fast is the sampler to produce an image of a given quality ?
- How do the algorithms scale with more complex area light geometry ?
We will start by creating a "ground truth" image for each renderer (this image is generated by using a very large amount of samples so there is no more apparent noise). We will then render several images with varying amount of samples and measure the RMSE between these images and ground truth. Timings will be taken at each renderer. Having this data will allow us to draw a conclusion about convergence rate and general performance.
Notes About Sampling Parameters
For light samples, Arnold use the effective sample counts that are proportional – within a constant – to the square of the UI value. As we will see, this makes perfect sense is the variance follows this same rule in the case of Arnold. This makes the light samples slider linear in term of perceived noise.
3Delight
RenderMan
Results - RMSE
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Results - Scalability
For this test we will render 3 images that have a similar RMSE in all renderers but with a much higher area light count. We increase the Tube Per Step to 200 (10 times more area lights) and re-time the results.
Preliminary Conclusions (for self, re-wording needed)
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