Render Samples

Question

I know this is probably a bit premature in asking; however, this is the first time I've had a GPU to run renders. What is an efficient setting? Currently, I'm set at 1024 and 4096 for Viewport and Render respectively. I've always had to cut those numbers down drastically because I was using a laptop (CPU only).

Another one of those morbid curiosity questions until it becomes more important.

Answer 1 · 2024-08-29T16:23:50Z

Omar Domenech replied August 29, 2024 4:23pm

And as always, it depends. It's not a straight answer sadly, it will depend on your scene, materials, if you're going to do composting, if you have animation, if you have transparency, if you have caustics, if you have a lot of glossy surfaces that create noise, each scene is too different to have a single global setting. And also if you're going to denoise the render (which I typically only use for preview), when I'm doing the real render I tend to turn it off and take the render time hit, I feel denoise is never perfect at maintaining sharpness. So I guess the default setting of the threshold is good enough for most scenes.

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Answer 2 · 2024-08-29T17:59:50Z

Martin Bergwerf replied August 29, 2024 5:59pm

Omar is absolutely right!

There is much to say about this, but you can safely use the default Settings.

When Rendering on CPU, the Tile Size might need to be reduced to 32 or 64, under Performance > Use Tiling:

But for GPU Rendering, all the defaults are usually good.

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Answer 3 · 2024-08-30T01:46:45Z

replied August 30, 2024 1:46am

Thank you guys. I'm running a measly 3060, but it's night and day to what I was trying to putter around with before on my laptop.

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Answer 4 · 2024-08-30T02:09:05Z

replied August 30, 2024 2:09am

You can always adjust the noise threshold too, so it stops rendering when that is reached and leave the samples at default. Can have a great influence on render times too.

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Answer 5 · 2024-08-30T05:13:06Z

Martin Bergwerf replied August 30, 2024 5:13am

The Noise Threshold is enabled by default; it works per Pixel.

It looks at the difference between two consecutive Samples for each Pixel and stops Rendering the Pixels as soon as that difference is less than the Threshold, or if the Maximum Samples is reached.

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