Each render algorithms has different benefit in different Scene / Light Situations. Some common Render engines using following Algorithms:
Here is list Pro and Con based on my own Experience :
Pathtracer
Pro :
- easy to use
- best for exteriors
- great characters and outdoor renderings
Con :
- bad for caustic
- not so good for interiors with much indirect lighting and small light sources
BiDirectional Pathtracing
Pro :
- very good for interiors
- good and fast caustic
Con :
- not so fast for outdoor rendering
- slow for reflected caustics
Spectral Rendering
Pro :
- super easy to use
- most correct physics
- mediun rendering
- make use of physical correct modeling
- great out of box image quality
Con :
- slower rendering
- more memory use 32 floats instead 3
- need physical correct materials
- hard to get aov etc..
- shader limitation
Metropolis Light Transport
Pro :
- faster for reflected caustic
- excellent for caustic
- best for interiors (indirect lighting, small light sources)
Con :
- very slow for exteriors
Path Guiding
Pro :
- extreme good for interiors (indirect lighting, small light sources)
- much faster than PT for scenes with very difficult lighting (e.g. light coming through a small opening, lighting the scene indirectly)
- fast caustics
Con :
- not so fast for glossy materials
- more setup time (tweaking render settings)
- problems with detailed geometry
Biased Rendering
Pro :
- fastest rendering
- very useful for caustics + reflected caustics
- most flexible render setups
- great shader hacks
Con :
- hard to setup
- need knowledge if optimization algorithms
- hard deal with large dataset
- biased, artefacts, splotchy, low frequency noise
- can have large memory footprint
stochastic progressive photon mapping
- best for indoor
- small memory footprint
- handles all kinds of caustics robustly
Heribert Raab 