Rendering time VW 2023 compared to VW 2022 SP5

[Swede61]

Something is really wrong with VW 2023 and especially when using an Apple M1 processor.

 

I've got two computers with VW installed - one iMac 27" (late 2015 32 GB, 4.0 GHz Quad core i7) and one MacBook Pro 13" (2020 16 GB Apple M1) both of them running macOS Monterey 12.6.

 

When running VW 2022 and earlier versions the Apple M1 computer rendered images twice as fast as the old i7 but after installing VW 2023 the Apple M1 computer take nearly double the time compared to the i7.

 

Rendering quality is however an improvement in VW 2023 especially when it comes to render grass. VW 2022 (and earlier) took a lot of TLC with Photoshop to fix lawns, etc.

 

I have attached a chart with rendering time in hr:min:s and four images. The image are rendered with identical settings in bot versions of VW. The longer rendering times in VW 2023 is of course caused by better rendering of the grass - but what happened with the M1?

 

 

 

[Andy Broomell]

Have you also done tests on renderings that don't have any Grass? The grass shader is very time-intensive, and from your images it looks like it wasn't actually rendering the grass blades in 2022. Perhaps that could explain the major time difference? Just a guess. 

[zoomer]

Could also be that the grass is growing downwards ?

At least in the past the top face normal of DTMs was pointing downwards ....

[Swede61]

Yes the better grass rendering explains the additional time in 2023 - but it doesn't explain why the M1 computer is so much slower.

[Swede61]

@Andy Broomell I ran some more tests without grass (see below).

 

The conclusion is that it is the grass shader which is causing the M1 computer to be rather useless with VW 2023.

 

 

[herbieherb]

The grass shader is intended for small patches of detailed grass in the foreground as it produces a huge amount of geometry. If you're showing grass in bigger patches and you're viewing it from farer away like in your example you can use a parallax shader to achieve almost the same effect but without additional rendertime.

[gijsmans]

The 16GB of the M1 is the bottleneck in this case I presume. 16GB is used for cpu and gpu tasks.