Blender 3.2 just added shadow caustics for Cycles and it's a definite improvement for Cycles. but points to just how amazing the Cheetah renderers are/were because both were able to do both shadow and reflection caustics better than Cycles can now (albeit Cycles is much easier to set up, you just toggle on shadow caustics for a lamp and it "works" for low values of "works").
I haven't spent nearly as much time tweaking the blender scene as I did, once upon a time, with the Cheetah 3D scene, but I was able to more-or-less duplicate the lighting setups and the materials are pretty close. The Cheetah image is far richer in terms of internal reflections and caustic shadow detail. I took the stats shots around the 100 sample point, but I wasn't able to figure out how to export the blender render until it got to 250 odd samples. To my eye the C3D render looked slightly cleaner at ~100 samples than the Cycles render, but obviously it took a fair bit longer.
All of this was on an Macbook Pro with an M1 Pro Max.
Edited: put images inline and added C3D render (which was rejected due to size).
C3D 7.5.1 Falcon
Blender 3.2 Cycles
I haven't spent nearly as much time tweaking the blender scene as I did, once upon a time, with the Cheetah 3D scene, but I was able to more-or-less duplicate the lighting setups and the materials are pretty close. The Cheetah image is far richer in terms of internal reflections and caustic shadow detail. I took the stats shots around the 100 sample point, but I wasn't able to figure out how to export the blender render until it got to 250 odd samples. To my eye the C3D render looked slightly cleaner at ~100 samples than the Cycles render, but obviously it took a fair bit longer.
All of this was on an Macbook Pro with an M1 Pro Max.
Edited: put images inline and added C3D render (which was rejected due to size).
C3D 7.5.1 Falcon
Blender 3.2 Cycles