VRayIES vs Photometric free light

[duke2]

I did a test using 32 IES lights in circular array. They cast shadows onto a bunch of teapots below. They were replaced with photometric lights using the same params as the vray IES lights and thrown into a new layer.

Photo IES with vrayshadowmap@1024: 1:20 / 1371MB
Photo IES with vrayshadowmap@128: 1:03 / 592MB
VRay IES with raytraced shadows: :56 / 576MB

Photo IES no shadows: 0:38
VRay IES no shadows: 0:36

Conclusion: Use VRay IES lights. There is absolutely no advantage to using the Photometric one with shadowmaps in either memory usage or rendertime.

[vlado]

Well, that was one of the reasons to implement the VRayIES light; for some reason, the standard 3ds Max photometric lights can be inexplicably slow.

Best regards,
Vlado

[olly]

Isn't it because max photometric's create 6 shadow maps per light like an omni?