Different reflections: viewport render preview vs render

[kelheor]

Recently I did some experiments with lighting and got an issue with reflections on render, which you can see in the picture:

Scene itself:

I used Blender 2.8, Cycles, single area light, in both cases I set 512 samples to render.
Maybe somebody can tell me the reasons, why I’m getting different reflections on render, which don’t exist in render preview?

.blend file:
Reflections.blend (3.9 MB)

[CarlG]

Without a shared scene to experiment with, it’s going to be hard to guess.

[kelheor]

Ok, I updated post and attached .blend file.

[IkariShinji (Thies Schulz-Holland)]

You have “Simplify” enabled with different “AO Bounces” settings for viewport (0) and render (2)…

[kelheor]

Wow, thanks! Disabling “Simplify” or changing AO Bounces value helped to solve this issue.