We render tens of thousands of frames every day, 365 days per year. During this time, we monitor all the processes, to be able to proactively make adjustments and fixes, when necessary. The resulting data sometimes shows interesting side results; in this case, I’m going to refer to speed differences in rendering.

Starting with Blender 3.0 we have noticed that, for the exact same hardware, different projects behave in quite different ways. Some projects render in comparable times on our CPU and GPU machines. Some projects render way faster on the GPU servers. And a small fraction of the projects actually render faster on CPU – usually, projects that make use of volumetrics and/or motion blur may fall into this category.

This sparked a new question – are there speed differences between various Blender versions, too? And this is a question we can answer, seeing that at the time of writing this, we support Blender starting with version 2.75 until version 3.4.