New 1.5dev build with many improvements to viewport rendering: http://www.luxrender.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=30&p=111176#p111176
Great work, thanks all 
I just wanted to say that I’ve been playing with luxcore 2.x + luxblend these last days (havent tried 1.5dev build yet) and the results are incredibly promising. Viewport rendering, opencl accelerated pathtracing that uses both cpu + gpu (with sobol or metropolis), option to make it biased, and the ability to switch to bidir or vertex merging when needed is priceless… I don’t see any reason why luxcore couldn’t overcome cycles in the future, I need to make some speed tests with path opencl. I’m also investigating how flexible nodes are… but anyway, when stable luxcore / luxblend comes out this will be hands down the best engine for photorealism, difficult light situations and many more stuff… the only thing hard to match (though I haven’t investigated lux 1.x enough) is cycles node flexibility… but I may be mistaken here.
congratulations to the amazing coders behind luxrender, really amazing job with luxcore, it’s beautiful to see it render interactively in the viewport with all the advanced algorithms at our disposal.
It’s nice to know that the Lux team is finally working on tackling a major weakness that has prevented the engine from really taking off like Indigo and Thea, and that is how it had a reputation to take a long while to render (even with bidirectional and metropolis sampling).
Perhaps now, the Lux forums will start seeing a lot of more diversity in the work shown rather than the usual fare (lighting experiments/studies, prisms and gems, and photorealistic DAZ studio dolls). In other words attracting a lot more than would-be academics who use it for light studies.
When I last tried Lux, one of the things I didn’t like was how the convergence rate seemed to grind to a stop after a while when using Metropolis and Bidir sampling, hopefully it’s at the point where 90 percent of the rendertime is no longer spent with the last 5-10 percent of noise. Recent tests do indeed look like it’s becoming more of an artist’s engine now.
Wow. I never really got into Luxrender because of how slow it was but perhaps it is time to give it a real try now. These new improvements look absolutely fantastic.
LuxRender is a true beast. LuxCore bidirectional integrator is freaking amazing. It’s not a joke to implement bidirectional path tracing, not to mention having it together with MLT.
It all has a tad bit of slowness to it but it’s getting really good these days!
I did some speed comparisons against Cycles, and it’s pretty close.
Keep up the killer work, guys!