Quality vs. Speed balance

[Red333]

Hello!

Wondering if anyone has found a good balance between quality and speed. I'm having issues with flickering at 100 samples. I know that's low, but it seems like I have to boost the samples to at lease 1000 to get decent results but then the renderings times skyrocket. Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance!

[s.balabanov]

Hi Red333,

This is one of the toughest questions with rendering There are multiple factors at play in this balance:

1. Quality is subjective - what do you consider acceptable quality? For example, noise can be reduced by denoising, but that would likely blur details. GI bounces can be reduced to speed up rendering, but affect the light accuracy. There are many more similar approaches to trade speed for quality and only the user can decide where tho draw the line. Could you please share examples of what quality you are going for, and in what areas you are comfortable to compromise on quality?
2. Speed is dependent on hardware. We've seen substantial increase in performance over the generations of GPUs. Could you share what is your current workstation specs (including drivers)? These could help us provide some advice.
3. Both quality and speed are very dependent on the particular scene setup. These include number of lights, types of materials and their parameters, the shape of the geometry, animation of objects, lights and camera. Based on these and the compromises you are willing to make, there are optimizations that can be done. Generally, if one does not want to analyze their scene, raising the quality settings will eventually result in improved quality, but as you have seen, it raises rendering time.

Could you describe in detail the project/scene you're currently working on, so we can provide more relevant suggestions? The more details you provide, the better the advice. In fact this is one of the reasons we ask for user scenes when we discuss problems.

Best regards,
Simeon

[npg]

As Simeon said, it's quite scene dependent, so don't expect a very firm and specific answer. You should also mention which denoiser you're using.

[cadman5]

Hello!

Wondering if anyone has found a good balance between quality and speed. I'm having issues with flickering at 100 samples. I know that's low, but it seems like I have to boost the samples to at lease 1000 to get decent results but then the renderings times skyrocket. Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance!

300 samples must be good and relatively quick for most cases.