new in the forum..help to purchase corona render

[matteosperi]

hello everyone,
this is the first time I write on the forum.
My vray license is about to expire and I am thinking of purchasing Corona, for the first time.
Surely the price is very competitive and the forum posts some wonderful works. It scares me to switch to cpu system.
I only use gpu since 2016, first octane render and then vray gpu.
I would like to switch to Corona especially for the much more developed architecture community than vray.
Soon I am updating my workstation with:

- CPU AMD RYZEN 9 5950X 16C / 32T 3.4GHz Turbo 4.9GHz 64mb
- MB ASUS X570-PRO
- 128 gb RAM

I am a little worried about the render times even though corona is very fast..I have seen render times of 4/5 hours per image in 2/3 k definition.
should i expect similar rendering times? or in general interior or exterior scenes of medium complexity are rendered in a shorter time?
(I would like to know some of your experiences before changing software)

thanks everyone for the advice .. it would be of great help
Matteo

[TomG]

It will vary greatly depending on the scene. For instance this week I've been rendering some HD animations which have varied from 40s to 5 mins per frame depending on the scene on a 3960X, and I've certainly had HD that takes 20 mins per frame too sometimes. While I hope others can share their experience, one suggestion is grab the 45 day demo, because then you can try it out with YOUR scenes, and know how it performs with what you tend to render and how you tend to set up the scenes.

[Nejc Kilar]

I'd suggest you follow Tom's advice too - get the demo and test it yourself, it's going to be the best way to see how it performs.

Broadly speaking, and this really is a super generalized statement but you can do some cross referencing with your current system and how the 5950x will perform by comparing your results with the benchmark we have.

The 5950x needs about 45ish seconds to complete the benchmark. Let's say your current system needs about 90 seconds. So now you can test your actual scenes with your current workstation and since the 5950x is basically 2x as fast in the benchmark than your CPU you can deduct the time from your tests with your current workstation and get a sense for how the 5950x will perform. Basically, if your test scenes need 10 minutes to render you can assume that with the 5950x they'll need about 5 minutes.

Again though, the above is a bit generalized because scenes differ from one another and so its more of a "thumb estimate" but in practice I find it to be accurate enough.

[matteosperi]

thank you very much for the advice; you are very kind;
i want to test corona with my current workstation and then test it with the new workstation.
I don't ask the question..better corona or vray ..
but for me there are some points:
- corona's forum gallery in architecture is amazing and very extensive
- personally i love corona sun and sky and i think they are better than vray
- the glass material of the corona are better
- the cost of a cpu workstation is much less than a gpu

I am a little scared by the rendering times for my workflow but I have to do tests.
Thanks, Matteo