Blender 'Mobile' Cycles Test.

I pushed my mobile Blender setup a lot harder and rendered a full Cycles animation. This was done in Blender 4.3.2 with Cycles, which unlike Eevee, sadly has no GPU support, so I rendered it through CPU software paths on the same setup, then exported as a PNG sequence and assembled into an MP4 with FFmpeg. Yes, this took about 60+ hours of total render time (including the crashes/optimizations and overnight renders)

No, I will not be attempting this again anytime soon. 2.5- nights in a row, so roughly 60 hours total, which works out to around 7.5 minutes per frame for 480 frames. I chose this scene specifically because it is a nasty test for a mobile CPU-emulated environment.

It has glass, dispersion, multibounce internal reflections, caustics, and a lot of light splitting through the material stack.

In other words, all the fun stuff that makes path tracing slow on purpose.

The main point of this render was not "look what I made," but more, "can my phone survive a proper raytraced workload without dying like a dehydrated lizard in a microwave?"

Apparently, yes, eventually. Eevee tests are easy easy compared to this one, this was the real stress test. I don't recommend anyone else abuse their phone with examples like this one, but stay tuned if any of this interests you in the slightest.

I have many more finished and unfinished tests and examples to share.

Render details: Engine: Cycles 4.3.2.

Resolution: 1920x1920.

Samples: 2048.

Adaptive sampling: on, threshold 0.005, min 128.

Light paths: max bounces 128, diffuse 12, glossy 12, transmission 64, volume 8.

Caustics: reflective on, refractive on.

Denoising: OFF (because it is not supported in my current setup, so I had to compensate with higher samples and deeper light paths).

Color management: Filmic, very high contrast.

Frames: 1-480 at 30fps.

Output: PNG RGBA, compression 15.

Scene setup: HDRI: vintage_measuring_lab_8k.exr from Poly Haven.

Lighting: 3 area, 3 spot/key lights.

Camera: 80mm lens, 36mm sensor, f/2.8, fully keyframed orbit over 480 frames.

Materials: procedural animated emission stack, custom dispersed glass stack with multiple refraction/IOR layers, and a PBR base/floor setup.

PS: Speaking of mobile Blender on Android, has anyone else seen any news from Blender Official about a release date/roadmap for mobile release? NGL seeing official touch support coming is an absolute game-changer. Since I don't currently have a PC rig or laptop set up, finding ways to make mobile workspaces viable has been the only way I can feed my Blender addiction. This official support is exactly what the community needs.