Why is global trace depth controlled by a setting under the IPR tab?

[GregCooper]

I've only just discovered that this setting under the IPR tab is still also controlling the max trace depth for final renders on GPU (Vray for Maya here). Obviously with it being under IPR we'd assume that it only affects the IPR. I remember reading this was the case a really long time ago but I'd just assumed it would have been fixed by now. Just did a test and nope, the setting under IPR still controls max trace depth for final renders. Kinda frustrating considering I've done quite a few renders just recently thinking that I had my refraction settings turned up high enough on individual materials but this made no difference in the end.

As a user I'd expect the settings under the IPR tab to only affect IPR rendering. We should have the same setting under one of the other tabs for final renders.

[Muhammed_Hamed]

I have reported that multiple times in the past, last time I tagged Vlado and Alex in a very long post. I explained how this behavior is so frustrating and makes no sense
The trace depth in the IPR tab SHOULD not affect production rendering, I honestly consider this to be a bug, more than bad design..Most users don't know about this behavior, Octane uses 8 by default, Corona uses 24 by default so you would hear people talking about how Vray's glass doesn't look great
This was fixed in Vray for Modo, probs to the developer for considering the feedback. he removed the trace depth option from the IPR tab, and instead we have a global trace depth multiplier in the main tab that works for production rendering and IPR
it is also set to 24 by default, so we get very nice looking glass out of box
He also removed the local trace depth for materials, which I love(similar to Arnold, Octane, Corona) because I don't want to change the trace depth locally for a 100 materials in my scene

This is only Vray for Modo though, Maya, Max and Houdini plugins still have this issue. And I'm not willing to write about this again, I spent so much time explaining the issue in the past.

[GregCooper]

Yeah agree with all of this. Bad design or a bug, it’s just really confusing for us end users and we shouldn’t have to trawl through docs or forums to find the answers for something as simple as this