I was curious about the differences in rendering time myself. So I did a bit of experimenting just now.
From my own subjective experience, I never saw too much difference between G8's and G9's in rendering times, when I was working with my old GPU and doing mostly CPU rendering. Of course, some of the G9 assets coming out are just packed with bloated textures, like
MissFortune already mentioned. But my "gut" feeling was that, when all else was equal, the rendering times were similar.
I have my new card now so I tried to duplicate two scenes as closely as possible, using 3 G8's in one, and 3 G9's in the other. Both are a male, with two females. I left the male naked, because it's damn hard to find good clothes for male characters -AND- that are available in both G8 and G9 configurations. The female models are wearing the
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since it uses the same 4K textures for both versions, differing only in morphs. All the characters are using the same male hair called
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.
For skin materials, I used only DAZ Studio base materials (G8 Male base and the Male, Female 1 and Female 2 Base Mats for the G9's) I set Sub-D at 3, because G9 defaults to that and the resolution at 1080p (most common game resolution still). For morphs, I kept the G8 ones stock and since G9 is androgynous, I applied Bain's Body and head (it's not considered HD) and then for the female morphs, I used Van Helsing on one (non HD) and JS Jenny on the other (HD version). And just because it hurts me to see a male toon sexless, I put default dicktator gens on both males.
For lighting, I used
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to keep it simple and consistent between the two scenes.
I then applied the same poses and basic positions to both scenes.
This way, the difference between the rendering times should be almost exclusively caused by the difference in the models themselves, and not some outside influence such as lighting or environment textures.
My results? See below, but basically, I rendered the G8's in 2:24 mins, while the G9's did it in 2:22 mins. So my gut feeling was right.
Like I said above... lighting seems to me to be the biggest influence on rendering times (makes sense, because DAZ has to calculate all those rays and interactions) ... and outside textures (cloths and environments) are the second biggest influence.
(PS.. don't judge me on these renders... very quick and very ghetto! Lol)
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