From my tests it looks like arnold is somehow a little faster in pure bruteforce. Also, they have very pleasant noise imho. And they have glossy reflections depth. Which sometimes provides you with pretty fast glossy surfaces, that you might think it is the way, it should be. Until you, of course, won’t rise the reflection depth. As far as I know, vray treats glossy deep inside, so you can’t limit only glossy reflection depth.
I know, that vray can handle sampling very efficiently. But you know Another vray checkbox will make me happy
Of course it can be done, but there’s options all over the place already Do you think it’s really that important to have it? If yes, we’ll do it, but then don’t complain that “V-Ray is too complex”
From what I know, Arnold is somewhat faster with brute force, but it is not adaptive (i.e. no “universal” settings approach). You either have to tweak shader samples individually (which could be tedious), or sample everything with the same fixed rate (which could be slow). This is part of the reason for the subjectively “better” noise - since the number of samples is known in advance, they can be distributed better; V-Ray does not know how many samples it will take, so it must use a more conservative distribution. Also, we have room for a lot of optimizations that we just never got round to; V-Ray can easily be 20-30% faster after we have finished our current round of optimizations.
I asked to test Arnold for 3ds Max earlier this year and was told that they have no immediate plans to support 3ds Max - is that no longer the case or are you using the standalone version?
The VRayOverrideMtl material only applies to those objects that have that material (don’t confuse it with the global material override in the V-Ray settings).
Yes? I thought that’s what you meant by ‘glossy depth’… I seem to remember reading in some siggraph paper that Arnold reduces the glossiness of surfaces that are seen in reflections in order to reduce the noise. I thought that’s what you wanted to get?
Actually I did an extensive comparison with arnold, and guess what, the render time is almost the same as vray. Actually in my test vray was faster by a little bit.
Vlado I believe arnold does use adaptive sampling.
Another vray checkbox will make me happy 
