What are the benefits of using the vray dome light instead of the enviormental light?
i assume you mean GI lighting instead of Dome lighting. The dome light is faster because the domelight knows many things in advance that have to be sampled with GI. That also leads to a lot sharper and more defined shadows depending on the quality of the HDR. It also automatically downsamples HDRs to a predefined size.
Thorsten
I am referring to the the GI environmental (skylight) and a vray dome light. In a quick test I just did, the GI environment light is quicker. I’ve never used the vray dome light. Wondering why one would use it?
In newer versions vray dome light allows you to map a hdr imageto it in order to produce sharp shadows and nice HDR lighting from the image. It’s supposed to be faster and less noisy, especially in animations.
try getting sharp shadows or even well defined GI, not just the usual blurry mumbo-jumbo and you´ll see 
To have the GI environmental skylight off means having the max environment slot set to black…correct?
you could still have it on if you got a map in the GI Environment override slot
you can use the domelight also without GI, for a nice lighting.
Hi, could you elaborate…would i have to map an hdri or will a solid color do?
Thanks
Vivek
well for a solid colour you dont need to map anything…just set the vray light to type dome and use the light´s colour selector…mapping is only needed when you want IBL…mind you that´s the only way to get directional shadow…the non-mapped type will give you pure diffuse gi-like lighting only