There’s an addon “Blender pause”, which lets you to pause whole blender and dump it to tray.
I’ve used it to render big scenes overnight, pausing when getting to computer, and unpausing when going away.
Everything was fine, except of course samples per second, as of blender is just counting start time and end time timestamps, instead of effective time.
Enabling it adds that light to the list of lights that can be sampled directly. This makes sampling the light more efficient, but each sample can only pick one light, so the more lights on the list, the more noise. (branched path can sample all the lights, so more lights on this list means a slower render instead of a noisier one).
Disable it for lights that do not significantly illuminate anything that’s not right next to them. And try to limit how many total lights you have in your scene. (I’d say “limit how many lights you have MIS enabled for” but that implies you can wiggle out of this by disabling MIS on lights that would need it if not for a zillion other lights that also need it. Which doesn’t work)
EDIT: I should note that one of the GSoC projects from last year is “many light sampling” which improves performance when you have a large number of lights with MIS.
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I’m kinda disappointed that there s nothing exciting for cycles in this release for me beside the mo blur from .Abc, i hope the Bf will recruit someone to work on the long list of patches that needs to be reviewed and worked on
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Nothing is at a standstill there are many development meetings with various international collaborators, and there have also been some good updates in previous releases. I am happy with the work done.
I also want some update in other Blender parts, such as NURBS but nothing happend in 20 years
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Same here. There was talk a year or so back about giving more tools for procedural material creation - and I did see some new features being worked on, but these appear to be either abandoned or have been stuck in review for a while:
Enhancements to Voronoi - abandoned 
https://developer.blender.org/D3743
Gabor Noise - Needs Review
https://developer.blender.org/D3495#85625
Hex tile texture - Needs Review
https://developer.blender.org/D6410
SDF Nodes - Needs Review
https://developer.blender.org/D6464
Line Material node - Needs Review
https://developer.blender.org/D7270
Truchet Texture Node - Needs Review
https://developer.blender.org/D6304
Blue Noise dithered sobol - needs revision
https://developer.blender.org/D2149
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if i remember correctly those are thing that will serve more the big studios/company, like the support for rt core for AMD card, cpu+gpu ( optix ) rendering etc, most of what im reading in the rendering meeting doesn’t affect me
On the other hand i can t wait for the work of kevin to be merged ( fast scene update ) hopefully it will make it for the rendering and not only for the viewport
There was also a GSOC that ended-up as improvements in 2.81, 2.82 & 2.83.
Yes. Those patches are waiting for review.
But that may be comprehensible that after reviewing Omar’s work, cycles dev were taking a break about procedural stuff.
The only patch that is tagged as abandoned is as is ; because, according to its author, it was outdated after Omar’s work.
But if you read Charlie’s last remark, it is clear that idea is not abandoned. Just the patch is.
So, Charlie’s work may end-up in Blender after restart of a cycle of priorities.
I think that Add Line material node will probably enter into competition with lanpr or be part of future Viewport Compositor’s work.
That is easy to pick your 7 favorite patches.
But developers have continuously to think about integration of almost one hundred of patches waiting for reviews, just for Cycles.
2.91 is a poor release in terms of Cycles features. Since Cycles integration in 2.61, it is the first and unique release without a section of release notes dedicated to Cycles.
But there is already a Cycles section in release notes of 2.92.
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Cycles should be seriously strengthened…
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I’m pretty happy with Cycles as it is right now. Unpopular opinion, I know 
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Not only you, but many others software users use Cycles for their final renders such as for ZBrush users and CAD, only few persons are never happy, they get for all free and ask again and again. and maybe they never supported once time Blender.
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There is a difference between appreciation and reverence. Fanboy-ism whether it’s for free software or paid one is not useful. Innovation is spurred because people want better tools. Nobody is holding a gun to the head of Ton and the rest of the Blender developers, but it is good to let them know that improvements are being asked for, and which ones specifically.
Personally at the moment I find Cycles to be far too Nvidia-heavy. There needs to be a balance with other GPU’s so as to allow for choice and options which should always be welcome, especially by this community.
Everyone has different needs for their workflows, and it’s important to let the developers know because they might not be aware of the issue. Just because something works perfectly for your own workflow doesn’t mean that it’s working perfectly for others.
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I don’t want to be here to create a ping pong of answers, I just say that they work hard and take into consideration many factors not only the requests of the individuals who predict and complain continuously, these developers have been working for free for the community for decades, and I too would like different things, which I have been waiting for for years, but I think Cycles already takes into account many requests.
the list of updates is long and even if a new release does not present exciting news this does not mean that there is no work on bug fixes and small improvements.
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It might have been the case years ago, when most contributors were volunteers, but core developers have been salaried (and fairly at that) for years now. I believe they’re paid around 5k€/month (before tax, I suppose). This is a number I deduced from the monthly Blender fund divided by the number of developers. Other factors might come into play, so take it with a grain of salt, but my point is, no, most of them certainly don’t work for free. This is not mentioning developers paid by companies such as AMD or Nvidia.
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And oh well I propose to whip them if they do not reach the results that you all want, I have no words and I am also tired of replying to these arguments. no one is obliged to use blender, there are many alternatives here a list.
https://indigorenderer.com/
https://www.arnoldrenderer.com/
https://www.3delight.com/
https://renderman.pixar.com/
What the hell ? Did you mistake me for somebody else ?
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No, however, immediately to count in your pocket on how much they take as if they were there forced to develop, for us, however I meant to say that it took years before all this could have an economic feedback for the developers, and I am happy that they can do a job finally paid after years.
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Blender, with all the staff in tow, has set a very ambitious and important goal. Right now they’re not just writing lines of code, they’re writing a piece of history for me.
Just as they are carrying out and massively developing all the sectors, sculpting, pencil, animation … it is right to give a certain thickness also to Cycles.
I work purely in the ArchiViz, and I see that there are still many things that I can enhance. Glass shading is a tragedy. Metals can be improved. The same goes for displacement and the use of HW to manage it. The option to include / exclude objects from lighting is missing. It would be a dream to see a lightmix like in other important engines. And speaking of light … Good but not very good. We need to improve. These are just some of the hypotheses on which to focus the focus, the point of view of those like me who use Blender for work.
What the…?
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They have said many times that this render engine is focused on animation production and there are many compromises and that Blender is not a CAD program, for this type of problems there are many other rendering engines, like LuxCore. and many CAD programs, are just different goals, but I often see excellent works in the field of architecture, even if many fields have been disrupted not everything can go hand in hand, and I believe that the goals often do not coincide with our desires.
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So people can’t just highlight some features they are exited are in development and express minor disappointment that they haven’t landed yet.
Nowhere did I say the items I listed should be focussed on above the other stuff that the Cycles team are currently working on. If there is more important work to be done under the hood, then of course it should take priority over a new procedural texture here and there.
I think you need to take a chill pill.
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