Has anyone tried or benchmarked Karma for interior or archviz rendering?!

I did some experiments a while ago comparing vray and karma for interiors. Karma obviously is slower, quite a lot, since it doesn't have a LightCache or similar for secondary rays. You can optimize for interiors and have reasonable render times but you won't beat vray in pretty much any case. That said, if you set up vray to not use Lightcache and only brute force, things are a lot closer than you might think - it's just not something sensible to do. So, you can use Karma for Archviz, but it's not what it's made for.

racoonart
I did some experiments a while ago comparing vray and karma for interiors. Karma obviously is slower, quite a lot, since it doesn't have a LightCache or similar for secondary rays. You can optimize for interiors and have reasonable render times but you won't beat vray in pretty much any case. That said, if you set up vray to not use Lightcache and only brute force, things are a lot closer than you might think - it's just not something sensible to do. So, you can use Karma for Archviz, but it's not what it's made for.

Would you say it would be worth it to redo some of those tests considering speed optimizations that might have made it into Karma since then? How big would you say the difference in rendering speed was? 2x, 3x?

It was just a few months ago, there haven't been huge performance improvements since then. It's generally not really possible to say how much faster one is over the other. Lightcache is a big deal and it highly depends on the room and lighting situation. A big open room with one or several big windows will do fine in karma and is not necessarily a lot slower than vray due to the nature of the lighting (being direct). Try a complex room with lots of small openings and vray with the adaptive dome and lightcache will be several times faster easily. It just depends. Karma is not designed for these types of jobs, and I don't think it's going to change any time soon.

racoonart
It was just a few months ago, there haven't been huge performance improvements since then. It's generally not really possible to say how much faster one is over the other. Lightcache is a big deal and it highly depends on the room and lighting situation. A big open room with one or several big windows will do fine in karma and is not necessarily a lot slower than vray due to the nature of the lighting (being direct). Try a complex room with lots of small openings and vray with the adaptive dome and lightcache will be several times faster easily. It just depends. Karma is not designed for these types of jobs, and I don't think it's going to change any time soon.

Thanks for the details! Was it prior to 20.5?

No I think I did that right when 20.5 came out.