Does DR in Corona really speed up render times

[cgbeast]

Just started testing Corona in our office.  Still getting used to it but like the quality I'm getting.  I want to test DR mode and was wondering if users notice a big jump in speed when rendering at full 4-5k images?

[pokoy]

DR means distributed rendering so of course it will help to get better performance by adding another PC and use its CPU power, the performance increases almost linearly depending on how many PCs are added and how fast they are.

[TomG]

As pokoy says, you are sharing the workload - so 2 identical machines will render in almost half the time (allowing "not quite" time for sending the scene across the network, but not very noticeable). Of course, just how much of a boost depends on the performance of the other machines, if the second machine is half the power of the first, then it will render in 1/1.5 of the render time, and so on.

[cgbeast]

Thanks guys.  One last dumb question.  How do I know it's faster? I know the machines will be listed, but since the scenes are path tracing, how do I know that they are cleaning up faster if I set a time limit to let's say 20 min.

[pokoy]

They'll render more passes than a single machine. You can see how many passes a machine contributes in the DR tab.

[maru]

Render for the same time on a single machine (e.g. 10 minutes) and using DR. Then compare the output.

[cgbeast]

Cool thanks.