Chaos Czech Brings Many Performance Improvements To Corona Renderer 5

Chaos Czech has just released Corona Renderer 5 for 3ds Max, bringing with it a bunch of performance enhancements. Performance is the major focus here, with Chaos wanting to give users more performance out of the hardware they already have. The caustics that were introduced in Corona 4 will see up to a 20% performance boost in 5, while geometry processing is improved up to 20x (no big deal, right?)

Corona Renderer – Cantilever House by Gullherme Pinheiro

The reason for such a stark performance geometry improvement is thanks to a new 2.5 displacement tool that utilizes “half” the memory as before, delivering greater efficiency. Chaos is so confident in this new displacement capability, that it’s being made default (at least with new scenes).

In one example given, a 5K render which once required 130GB of memory has seen its footprint reduced to 60GB with Corona Renderer 5. For our testing at Techgage, our chosen projects are not able to push obscene amounts of memory, so we’ve been unable to see any performance benefit in our quick testing. Our tests also don’t use caustics – so if you happen to be a Corona user with an advanced project you wouldn’t mind us using for benchmarking, please reach out (or comment).

Again, performance is the major focus here, and many facets of Corona have been touched on, such as bloom and glare calculations and scenes with lots of instances. In our testing, upgrading to Corona Renderer 5 did not change the end render result at all, so it seems like you will be completely safe to upgrade if you’re eager to see some performance improvements.

You can grab the latest Corona from its download page. Current Corona 5 support is for 3ds Max 2013 – 2020, and pricing remains in tact at $28.50/mo or $330/yr. We’re assuming that Corona 5 for Cinema 4D isn’t going to be too far off.