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

[eklein (Eric Klein)]

After discussion with Juan Gea Rodiguez from Bone Studio he showed me how to increase Optix sampling. I integrated this change into my scrambling distance and Optix build. I did comprehensive testing showing up to 2x faster than the standard Blender Optix.

Scrambling distance reduces the amount of random samples per pixel and has the potential of increase higher performance the lower the scrambling distance (SD) becomes, but if the scrambling distance (SD) value is to low it has obvious image artifacts. The SD value 1.0 means no scrambling distance.The key is finding the SD value for the amount of pixel samples that gives the best performance without visible image artifacts.

With the current Optix sampling setting that is on Blender the best performance I could get by lowering the SD was only 10%. Now by changing the Optix setting to high tile sampling I can get up 100% faster. This was just one line of code on the Optix device. Basically the GPU was completely under utilize with the lower SD values.

Now with the new Optix performance I wanted to find best scrambling distance value at each sample level that gives the best performance without visible image quality artifacts. I tested many types of interior and exterior scenes. I discover that below 100 samples having a SD value below 1.0 has little performance benefit and for samples above 1000 having a SD value below 0.1 had little performance benefit.

Here are my default values I use for scrambling distance after all my optix scene testing:
samples: 100 - SD(1.0)
samples: 250 - SD(0.2)
samples: 500 - SD(0.15)
samples: 1000 - SD(0.1)
samples: 2000 - SD(0.9)
samples: 4000 - SD(0.8)

Having a high optix tile sampling Blender build also requires large tile size to get the most performance out of SD. BMW scene at 100% output with SD value of 0.1 with different tile sizes:
25.50 sec (1920x1080)
25.65 sec (960x1080)
30.69 sec (512x512)
40.45 sec (256x256)
1:08.52 sec (128x128)

Below is my chart with all the test scenes. I use SD value of 0.1 except “Classroom” which use SD value of 0.19 due to its low samples. Use 1000 samples for “Chocofur Int 04” and Entity Designer Warm Bathroom scene.

I use my own custom build with SD and high optix tile sampling. E-Cycles RTX 2021 which gets the core of the performance improvement by scrambling distance/e-cycles pattern I set it also to 0.1 this way if gives identical image output compare to my custom build. The rest is set to default values.

The custom build was set to have only 1 or 2 tiles per scene. Usually tile size of 960x1080 up to 1920x1080 for best performance.
E-Cycles RTX optix use “Auto-Size” usually 64-128 tile size for best performance.
Blender Optix use 256x256 tile size for best performance.

GraphicAll has available the Bone Studio build with SD and high optix sampling. It is slightly slower than my custom build, but has other useful feature.

If desired I could make my custom build available I added the defaults scrambling values from above both for the preview and final render and it updates the UI displaying the current value being used on the scene. Inside my code I maintain a table for easy updating.

My ultimate goal is for Blender Foundation to add this feature at least as experimental. The benefits are great and risk in my opinion low and code patches are small.

[phoe-nix-art]

Interesting. I tried Bone Studio’s build a while back and I seem to remember I didn’t notice a significant difference with Blender vanilla, but I probably missed some settings.

In case you’ll release your own custom build I would be curious to test it with some of the scenes I’m currently working on (I’m using E-Cycles).

[Metin_Seven]

Hi @eklein ,

Sounds great, thank you. I’d suggest to post this in the Cycles Development section of Devtalk. I’m sure Brecht will be interested.

[YAFU (English is not my native language)]

Hi.
Brecht already knows about this:

Scrambling distance

What happened to Scrambling Distance? It´s been used in Theory and it will...

[YAFU (English is not my native language)]

Hi.
Another important thing to use alongside Scrambling Distance is the “Dithered Sobol” pattern under Sampling > Advanced for more uniform noise patterns. This is included in the Bone Studio build.

[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

[eklein (Eric Klein)]

I am aware of the scrambling distance task hopefully that work will be done soon. It has being in the queue for a long time. The issue is that scrambling distance alone won’t do much in performance unless the tile sampling is increase for optix. I was only getting at best 10% improvement without high tile sampling. Once it was added it went up to 100% improvement.

Be careful with using dither sobol. It does create worse artifacts with scrambling distance. That is why I usually don’t use it. It is quiet noticeably in noisy scenes. See below:

Dither Sobol with Scrambling Distance of 0.1 with Render Samples 5

Only Scrambling Distance of 0.1 with Render Samples 5

Notice on the wall above the chair and ceiling the streaks of sampling compare with only scrambling distance.

Dither Sobol with Scrambling Distance of 0.1 with Render Samples 1000

Only Scrambling Distance of 0.1 with Render Samples 1000

Even at 1000 render samples with dither sobol the wall above the chair and ceiling are not as smooth.

[YAFU (English is not my native language)]

@eklein

Be careful with using dither sobol. It does create worse artifacts with scrambling distance. That is why I usually don’t use it. It is quiet noticeably in noisy scenes.

That is strange, are you using the correct implementation?

The point is that Brecht was not convinced of the results with Scrambling Distance, then Juan Gea @Bone-Studio recommended using it together with dithered sobol for better results:

Scrambling distance

So if dithered sobol really does get bad results, then Brecht will disagree even more about incorporating these features.

[eklein (Eric Klein)]

I did the dither sobol with scrambling distance test using Bone Studio and E-Cycles both gave me the same artifacts shown above. In other less noisy scenes it might work better, but obliviously not all cases.

Dither sobol with out scrambling distance at 1000 samples in this scene did worse than Sobol when combine with Intel denioser, since the AI is train on Sobol pattern not Dither sobol.

[EAW]

@eklein

Intel denioser, since the AI is train on Sobol pattern not Dither sobol.

It would be interesting to see what the results would be like on a training data set using Dither Sobol. Unfortunately, my 10 year old hardware isn’t up to the task of efficiently creating the ground truth data, and I assume the same for the training itself.

[3dcal]

@eklein

GraphicAll has available the Bone Studio build with SD and high optix sampling. It is slightly slower than my custom build, but has other useful feature.

If desired I could make my custom build available I added the defaults scrambling values from above both for the preview and final render and it updates the UI displaying the current value being used on the scene. Inside my code I maintain a table for easy updating.

My ultimate goal is for Blender Foundation to add this feature at least as experimental. The benefits are great and risk in my opinion low and code patches are small.

Eric,
I just upgraded to RTX-3050 Ti laptop (ASUS TUF), and would like to try
your OptiX settings.
Is there a link to download your build? Is it ready to go, or need to be compiled?
Also, which Bone Studio build is the one to download? I couldn’t find it at GraphicAll.
Thanks for working on this & sharing!

[Ace_Dragon]

Is there anything specific about the value being 0.10 that outright eliminates the possibility of increasing the scramble amount (as the number of samples needed for smoothness in master decreases dramatically once you get to 0.20 and above)?

Is it possible for dithered Sobol to deliver improvements in conjunction with higher values or is it 0.10 or bust?

[3dcal]

@eklein

Is K-CyclesX the result of your optimization of scrambling distance & Optix high sampling?

Looks very interesting, and am considering purchase.
Is there a trial version?