Cycles rendering up to 2x faster by using Scrambling Distance and Optix High Sampling

[YAFU (English is not my native language)]

Just in case someone is interested, another trick to improve render times in some scenes (mainly internal scenes with HDRi) is to reduce AO bounces from the Simplify menu, even setting a value of 1 for it. It must be said that this changes the lighting of the scene, so you in addition to limiting AO bounces from the Simplify menu, you must enable Ambient Occlusion in the World tab and play with values there. You can read more about this from here:

Brecht's easter egg surprise: Modernizing shading and rendering

I can’t get what am i missing in the AO bounce feature (simplify panel). I can’t get any useful result with it, just overbright scene unless i use a very high count for bounces (5 and more), and still something seems wrong. It would be perfect if used the World AO settings and skip n bounces from there, from those settings, instead it does not. Anyone used it successfully? Lets forget the Blender classroom demo scene BTW.

this is important:

Brecht's easter egg surprise: Modernizing shading and rendering

Hi, set your DISTANCE to like 3m or 4m!

And a Brecht change in this regard to make it easier to setup what had been clarified in the message above:

Brecht's easter egg surprise: Modernizing shading and rendering

I’ve now changed it so AO factor can be used to adjust the intensity of the AO bounces approximation, should help in this test scene, maybe in more complex ones too. https://developer.blender.org/rB171c4e982