On my daily dev machine (Linux + AMD + Mesa) I get same order of compilation time as legacy EEVEE.
But it seems that nvidia drivers have a harder time with our new shaders for some reason (~3x from what I read).
First cold start of EEVEE-Next also takes quite longer than I would like to (a few seconds without any feedback), we could display a black frame with a waiting message instead, but ideally it should be less than 3 seconds.
So I think we have no choice but to optimize it at least a little for the first release. I have created a task for listing all the ideas about this ticket.
About AMD cards… one can buy a 24Gb card by half the price of a 4090. I walways had AMD cpus since 2000 but because there’s this legacy mith/fact that Blender sucks on Radeon graphics I keep buying NVIDIA just to be on the safe side. How does Eevee-next performs in a Radeon and how it compares to an nvidia card?
Anybody can give an inside info on this?
Using the tug boat demo scene, with the quality turned up really high in EEVEE-Next, I get these frame rates:
RX 7800 XT on Windows: 9.8fps
RTX 4090 on Windows: 17.2fps
Looking at performance comparisons of rasterized video games, this sort of performance gap is expected between these two GPUs. Which implies that that there’s no performance favoritism between these two GPU vendors in EEVEE-Next in this scene.
On another subject (back to shadows):
On today build and on a new complete scene the shadows seem to do nothing but flicker… I see no shadow at all actually …One of those cases that to improve we need to temporarily make it worse for sure.
Today the shadow flicker has gone smooth as a Persian cat… but also all the hard shadows
But wait… not only on Eevee-next, but Eevee-Legacy also seems to show worse shadows now than in Blender 4.1 official… can it be a new setting to blur the shadows.
Edit (day 3-04):
Today the Eevee-Legacy shadows are OK again and the Eevee-Next are as yesterday.
If they actually show up this refresh speed would be perfect!
Edit (day 4-04):
Not sure if it’s related but when using an insane amount of particles in the shot I’m getting shadows flickering issues on Eevee-Legacy when using 4.2. When the particles get triggered all the shadows flicker by the entire scene even when the particles don’t occlude them at all. This happens only on Legacy as on Next, at least until yesterday, they keep flickering all the time
We need AMD/NVIDIA hw raytracing, this is THE most wanted feature that forces everyone to export to Unreal to render fast.
Screen RT is nice, but now everyone has a HW RT capable card in its 3rd (!) generation already.
We need this badly.
Note that HWraytracing doesn’t provide performance, it is a visual quality improvement.
HW raytracing is only supported on Vulkan/Metal. So first step is to migrate to Vulkan But HW raytracing still need a fallback for hardware that doesn’t have HWRT support.
I don’t know much about this but what always seemed to me that makes Unreal/Unity faster is the fact that one can’t edit the objects (at run/render time (I know that someone will say it can edit them )) and the other is the LODs simplifications… am I close?
We need AMD/NVIDIA hw raytracing, this is THE most wanted feature that forces everyone to export to Unreal to render fast.
I imagine this comes more from engines like Unreal being GPU driven, and using things like meshlets (see GPU Driven Rendering Overview - Vulkan Guide, I imagine not all of this can be applied to Blender since it is not a game engine).
but now everyone has a HW RT capable card in its 3rd (!) generation already.
While this number of people grows, you’d be surprised how people with a 1050-era card or using iGPUs dominate polls if you were to run them :).
I have a non-RTX GPU, yet I use raytracing in UE5. On top of that, even with everything maxed out I get a much better performance than what I have in EEVEE-Next right now.
Some NVIDIA GPUs without RT cores have a fall back in the driver to perform the tracing of rays via the general purpose GPU cores. (I believe it’s 6GB or higher VRAM GPUs from the GTX 10 series and newer)
But there are still a lot of devices that don’t have a fall back that people might be using (E.G. RX 5000 series GPUs from AMD)
Or early versions of drivers that don’t have hardware ray tracing support, or a software fall back (I believe the NVK driver on Linux doesn’t support the ray tracing APIs for Vulkan via hardware or software)
I know. My point was that maxed out UE5 with raytracing on a card that doesn’t even have rt cores works way better than EEVEE-Next with its limited screen space effects. It should be the other way around. In other words, there is something very very wrong with the EEVEE-Next right now.
I never expect EEVEE NEXT to be as fast as game engines like Unreal 5,
but I really hope EEVEE supports all possible SHADER NODEs as much as CYCLES does.
Discussion about HWRT or that a racecar is faster than a SUV isn’t useful in this thread. Blender is CPU bound as that provides the flexibility that is expected. We are aware that users have different performance expectation and compare us to fancy racecars. (We see that as a compliment!).
We have a good insight where the performance bottlenecks are and improvements are done continuously. Adding a faster or slower GPU algorithm isn’t a deal breaker as the main bottlenecks aren’t inside the rendering pipeline but on the components EEVEE depends on or on the data transfers.
huge drop in animation performance since bigging of march builds in both eevee classic and eevee next.
I only have feb 28th and march 10th builds of 4.2 since i download new verion aprox. every 10 to 20 days. so i cannot pinpoint exact version
That sounds like an issue. Can you report a bug, so we can start an investigation. You can report a bug by pressing “Report a Bug” in the Help menu of Blender.
…One of those cases that to improve we need to temporarily make it worse for sure.
smooth as a Persian cat… but also all the hard shadows 
)) and the other is the LODs simplifications… am I close? 