Mental Ray - fast or slow?

[lazzhar]

http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?threadid=33132

And I bet there is some guys right here that could give us good idea about the speed of MR.
I'd like to hear about rendering Bump in MR for Maya (at least) why it's so slow?

[wurp]

I also noticed bumpmapping is very slow in mental ray, Im using XSI by the way. Another thing that I noticed being slow is glossy/blured reflections, its maybe more of a shader problem than a problem specific to mental ray, but it would still nice to see some shader for mr that could do faster glossy reflections.

I read the thread and noticed some really interesting points, some say that vray or brazil can render GI faster, but it seems as more experienced users still can achive the same speed in mental ray. Im pretty biased towards mental ray and xsi but it seems as if you want a raytracer for more complex scenes, mr is still the way to go. I tried vray, brazil and fr and it seems as if they all can produce high quality GI solutions with little or no tweaking, which is great ofcourse, mr on the other hand needs a little more tweaking and knowledge from the user, but on the other hand you can render more complex scenes with it. When I say complex I dont mean only in polycount, but also the way you can customize the renderer to fit the specific needs of your scene.

[P_T]

i thought MR is quite fast when it comes to rendering the image, the slow part is when it's calculating the Final Gather. unless u count that as part of the rendering...

[brunner]

It can be very fast, or very slow. It depends on how much MR knowledge you have :)
No, really, it's tricky to optimize it, but very rewarding.

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