Same setting different graphic

Enscape Host Applications Enscape for SketchUp
1

Hi there,

I have a question about rendering with different computers. Apart from speed, do the computer specifications also affect the quality of the render?

The lighting in Image 1 is much more “solid” than in Image 2. Is it possible to adjust some settings to make the renders match in quality?

Image 1 was rendered on a Mac Studio 14, while Image 2 was rendered on an i9 PC with an RTX 4000 graphics card.

Thanks.

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2

Hi @JOHNNY242023 !

What you’re seeing comes down to how Enscape renders lighting on each machine. In short, your Mac Studio is using software ray tracing, while the PC with the RTX 4000 is using hardware-accelerated ray tracing:

  • Software ray tracing calculates lighting using general-purpose GPU/CPU resources. It’s still very capable, but it’s inherently less precise when it comes to complex light interactions, such as indirect lighting, reflections, and shadow accuracy. On macOS, Enscape currently utilizes software ray tracing, as hardware-accelerated ray tracing is not yet supported by us on Mac. (Although some silicon chips have hardware ray-tracing) In your example, your Mac knows where to direct the light, but doesn’t know how to spread it around naturally.
  • Hardware ray tracing, like what’s available on NVIDIA RTX GPUs, uses dedicated ray-tracing cores built directly into the graphics card. These are designed specifically for calculating how light behaves in a scene, allowing for significantly higher precision, realism, and consistency — especially in areas such as lighting, reflections, and shadows. The results in light being disturbed more naturally (or solid, as you described).

It’s also worth noting that Apple Silicon Macs use unified memory, meaning the CPU, GPU, and system all share the same memory pool. In practice, this means Enscape may be competing with other running applications for resources. In contrast, the RTX 4000 features dedicated VRAM and hardware optimized for graphical workloads, allowing it to allocate its full capacity to rendering tasks (assuming no other programs are using your GPU).

Hope that clears things up! Please let us know if you have any further questions.

3

Somewhat related - I’ve not done extensive comparisons between Enscape versions or with/without hardware RT - but I’ve noticed generally that linear lights seem to have gotten “blotchier” at some point. If hardware raytracing is supposedly more precise, and presumably these are linear light sources, why are there noticeable hotspots in image 2?

4

The blotchiness you’re seeing is likely due to ray-traced noise and denoising artifacts. Whilst Hardware ray tracing improves realism, it can make some areas appear blotchy, especially in complex or under-lit scenes. If you find it distracting, you can disable this option in the settings.

Using emissive surfaces can also help, either supplementing or replacing linear lights, since these are also ray-traced in recent versions of Enscape.

Emissive used to cause blotchiness of their own, but now they are also ray traced , you can use those more readily - either to supplement the linear light or maybe even replace it entirely.

Another factor is lighting balance and scene complexity. Increasing the intensity of a light doesn’t reduce noise, because the number of rays traced stays the same, and high contrast between well-lit and shadowed areas can make blotchiness more noticeable. Scenes with lots of geometry or very bright materials can amplify these artifacts, as can over-exposing the image to compensate for low light.

In general, adding more light sources or , keeping strict PBR rules for materials and making sure your camera is not over-exposing to compensate for poor lighting will help.