

It is a capable and production-proven render engine that you can learn quickly and ask for help easily thanks to a large user community. If Blender is your first 3D software, it is better to use the included renderers such as Cycles. If you already know how to use Redshift and you use it in other software on a daily basis, it is logical to continue using it in Blender. The look you want to achieve, your workflow and pipeline with other DCC software, and your level of skill. But there are many more important factors you need to consider. Cycles is free, while Redshift for Blender will cost a significant amount of money when it becomes a part of your pipeline. Which Blender render engine is better for you, is reliant on your needs. Overall, Redshift has noticeably better render time/noise ratio and texture detail conservation. Two renderers for Blender, Cycles vs Redshift, have their strengths and weaknesses. It offers an abundance of control and customization tools to help you fine-tune the exact level of visual quality and speed you require from the render. For rendering, Redshift’s biased architecture allows for lightning-fast GPU-based rendering. Redshift provides a robust feature set such as volumetric rendering, hair rendering, tessellation and displacement, dedicated skin shader, etc. Furthermore, it has a variety of viewports and render denoisers, including the powerful OIDN (CPU) and OptiX (GPU) denoisers. Therefore, Cycles is a pretty fast path tracer in addition to its outstanding feature set.


Its support for OptiX-based rendering allows Cycles to significantly boost render speeds by using RTX cores. Besides, Cycles is able to take advantage of CUDA or OptiX-powered rendering from certain graphics cards. To name a few features, powerful PBR shading nodes, accurate subsurface-scattering, vector displacement and adaptive subdivision, volume scattering, and absorption, caustics, cryptomatte support, etc. Cycles has a wide array of rendering features.
