Sure, here you go. You will have to put in your own HDRI since I can’t share it. However, if you touch nothing else than the HDRI texture path, you’ll get 1:1 result. Both scenes are set up with the exactly same conditions, e.g. pure Path Tracing, Max ray intensity of 10, max ray depth of 12, gray diffuse material.
As for the VCM, it helps in some cases, especially with caustics, and also a bit with indirectly lit surfaces, but it’s still nowhere near the efficiency of cached GI.
TestScene_Max.zip (2.8 MB)
TestScene_Blender.zip (4.1 MB)
But these threads usually end up with every expert posting their own “special” setup with ridiculous workarounds and compromises, which often loses the point. It’s not about if you can fake something with AO and ambient light to get speed up. This thread was primarily intended to show how much value cached GI has, especially these days, when it can handle dynamic animations.