Unity Beta GI Benchmark, Come test our your results.

So I downloaded the 5.4.0b17 beta and noticed there aren't really many benchmark tests so I have started one.
It's very simple, it's simply the First Person Scene exported from the Standard Assets example that come with Unity, to save size.

The steps are as followed for anyone who is interested in participating.
1.Download the project, and open it up, ignore and clear the errors (Unity likes to export lots of junk when exporting scenes as a package....)
2.Open up the Lighting panel and hit render with the settings as is.
3.Post your Processor Brand, Pc Memory, GPU and the time it took you to render it
4.You can optionally upload a snapshot of the results, use the MainCamera Snapshot object as the point where you print screen. Remember to print screen it into paint and save as .Png.
5. List any other comments, concerns, errors etc you want.

I don't know where this is going but it would be nice to see any distinctions between users. I actually don't see too many of these within Unity. For example mine is stuck at 5/11 for quite a while and it keeps telling me that it clamped the requested resolution to 512 x 512 for some reason on the ground obstacles mesh. No matter what indirect resolution I set it to, even at 1, it just takes forever.

It would be nice for the Unity devs to try this out too.


Update: Unity claims the file which is 2.5 MB is too large for the server to process despite the limit being 4Mb....thanks Unity for wasting this whole post! I tried to delete the library folder which means you will have to allow it to rebuild but it should still work.

What I found very interesting is that while it had to rebuild the library, turns out this greatly improved the time it took to get to 5/11....the build I just had before deleting the library was stuck at 3/11 for a while....and didn't get to 5/11 for a whole minute....hmm

 

Looking from editor log, seems that it took 39minutes..

5.4.0b17 beta
win8.1, Intel I7-5930K @ 3.50ghz (12cpus)
Memory: 32gb
gpu: gtx 970
(GI cache is on ssd drive)

*would be nice to have editor log parser to take exact values for each step from the log..

 

Wow MGear that setup is a beast....lightmapper if you know what I mean hehe. Even on your machine it took 39 Mins which just isn't right.

Interesting, I did the test myself and after 1 hour it was at the final stages of the rendering and I was getting low memory warnings, I had 8GB but one of my sticks had died a week earlier so I was left with 4Gb. It finally gave errors job fail errors and hanged endlessly.

The strange thing was that their memory behavior was very bizarre going from 100K to 1Gb very quickly back and forth as shown in the uploaded video. It wouldn't let me terminate the jobs.exe processes so after I got rid of Unity.exe expecting them to go they were still there and I waited a minute but they were still there as if the process was still baking....

So this test was terminated due to a tiny scene using up 4Gb of memory....
Unity devs can you guys test this out too?

 

1hr 5minutes on:

5.4.0b17 beta
win10, Intel I7-4720HQ @ 2.60ghz (8cpus)
Memory: 16gb
gpu: gtx 970M
(GI cache is on ssd drive)

*run again after
clear cache, delete library/,
exclude gi cache folder and unity processes from windows defender
no difference: 1hr 4minutes

 

What is your opinion on the GI System Mgear, have you done anything good with it?

 

only tried it few times, so cannot really say..

didn't seem to work with procedural meshes (saved as mesh assets, some uv/tiling issues?),
and other times in real project just didn't have the time to fiddle with settings to get good looks..
(would be nice to have tutorials, or presets to select from..)

 

If a couple more people could also do this Benchmark and upload a couple images then I would be able to conclude the Baked GI feasibility once and for all.

 

Tried with 5.4.0b18 beta (same as b17, since no gi changes in release notes either)

With 5.3.5f1: 1hr 12min.. (although skybox and some scripts were broken)

 

I've been frustrated with the GI Baking in the beta versions as well and regardless of the scene have run into similar problems. It always seems to hang on 5/11 forever. For my last project, I just used realtime GI and Cinematic effects for Ambient Occlusion. I really feel like just baking the current scene that I see would be great, assuming I get a performance boost and if I must use an effect for AO, that's OK.

Macbook Pro 2.5Ghz intel Core i7 16GB 1600 Mhz DDR3
That scene took 1hr 12min

 

Alright, from this moment forth I officially announce that the Baked GI system in all versions of Unity 5 are not fit for serious use and is in need of an extreme overhaul. The result to time ratio on rendering is simply not acceptable in this day and age.

The precomputed GI in the beta of Unity 5 appears to be decent although higher levels of texel resolution do not achieve noticeable results in quality and dramatically increase rendering times but that is another benchmark for another day.

Thanks Unity, hopefully you can use this info to improve the software. It looks like the pressure's on for the Experimental Power VR Lightmapping feature supposedly coming out in 5.5.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B11iL4IgOgWLUTJWU1ZXOXFheTA/view

 

What do you need an Indirect resolution of 8 for? 2 takes 5 minutes here with Final Gather disabled. I've never seen FG add anything useful.

 

- This test example was for a demanding benchmark scene and the high indirect resolution is to compensate for the poor visual quality of Enlightens Indirect Lighting compared to Beast.
- If Final Gather really doesn't do anything, which you may be right, then that is on Unity themselves for including a useless feature which does nothing but add computation time. This is obviously not a normal scene but that is the nature of benchmarks.

 

5.4.0b19 beta: same 38mins