I have been testing the light groups a bit more in depth and I am getting some strange behaviour, not sure if I am doing something wrong.
This is how the “vanilla” image looks at 512 samples:
This is how it looks when I use the 3 light groups I’ve created. As you can see, there’s quite a lot of “splooches”:
I am using ecycles 2.91 for CUDA on win 10 64bit
Those blotches look like adaptive sampling artifacts. I recommend to use standard sobol instead (adaptive sampling uses PMJ silently). If the blotches stay with sobol, I would need a report with .blend file and I’ll have a look to it when support is back 
The 2 coupons are for different groups. New users can use the sales coupon, the 2020 users have access to a special coupon which require to have E-Cycles 2020 in your library.
The sales price is obtained with the coupons listed in the first paragraph:
Support Pause: You can get $50 off on E-Cycles with the coupon code HoHoHo or $100 off on E-Cycles RTX with the coupon code HoHoHoHoHoHo. Support will be back on the 4th of January 2021.
You just have to copy-paste the coupon corresponding to the version you choose during checkout.
Yes, the Blender Market versions are per calendar year. You can get memberships for CUDA or OptiX on Gumroad if you prefer to have the day you start at taken into account.
will check what happens without the Adaptive sampling and report.
you were correct, thank you very much! And I should have thought about it myself 
Do you think it will be possible in the future to use AS with the light groups?
Hi Bernardo,
only sobol and dithered sobol support light groups officially for now. Most scenes render faster with samples halved and AI-Denoiser than with adaptive sampling and AI-Denoiser anyway. This is mostly due to the fact that AIs are trained on sobol and that adaptive sampling is only speeding-up rendering when the scene complexity is very variable across the frame. As NLM is nearly not used anymore, I mostly test builds with sobol (activating adaptive sampling silently switch to PMJ).
On top of that, light groups are most of the time useful in the lightning setup phase only, which can now be done in the viewport (and where adaptive sampling is not available). When you are done with your light setup, you can apply the strength and tint and use adaptive sampling. So the priority to make both compatible is currently low.
If it really helps in a production scenario and is superior to other available techniques, I’m ok to investigate. Could you please provide such a case (per message/PM if you want)?
In this particular scene there’s indeed no difference in render times between using AS or not, I just noticed that in other scenes it does make a difference. As for the light groups I wanna export them to use them in post for an animation, so I don’t wanna “apply” them.
That said, I don’t have any particular need of using AS+light groups, so if it’s not in the list of priorities, no worries
THanks for your help!
I see, so that’s what you meant.
Thank you for the detailed explanation.
I will use the E-Cycles RTX 2020 coupon when I purchase.
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Is there a render farm website that works with e-cycles? My next assignment is to render an animation and I noticed vanilla blender doesn’t have optimized settings like persistent data which would help speed up the render. Unless I’m wrong about that.
Best
I have purchased MacOS e-cycles 2019 and 2020 (love it!). But I don’t see mention of e-cycles non-optix, non-rtx. Is that version discontinued in '21?
Most render farms are paid per hour you use their hardware. So offering E-Cycles would make your bill way smaller of course, but also cut their income too much.
You can make your own render farm with E-Cycles + Barista using the AWS cloud. For a little bit of setup time, it will also save you a lot of money
E-Cycles standard is also available in the 2021 version. Most Mac users moved to PC to use the RTX builds though. To monitor Mac builds usage, they will get their own page and be sold per Blender stable version now. I plan to add the 2.92 version when Blender 2.92 is released.
New builds of E-Cycles 2.92 are available!
Made with E-Cycles this weeks:
https://twitter.com/PMikulicic/status/1345802558586155013
https://twitter.com/Piero_Desopo/status/1341951384350945286
https://twitter.com/Piero_Desopo/status/1341499221107589120
Some hours left to get up to $100 off on E-Cycles on the Blender Market.
Happy rendering!
I would in a heartbeat but my Mac doesn’t Cuda and there is no plain vanilla E-cycles so there is no value in purchasing the RX.
Thanks - You have a link to any tut or documentation to do this before I purchase Barista beyond the Barista videos?
The CUDA version of E-Cycles is the one all CPU and AMD users take and it works well on Mac CPU. The speed-up offered by the AI-Denoiser is actually now higher than the base speed-up for CUDA or OptiX as you can divide your sample count by over 10 for still images in many cases. Of course it’s better with NVidia cards as those speed-ups stack, but the AI-Denoiser is still the biggest render-time saver. The viewport light groups are also a huge human-time saver.
Not yet, but the process is the same as Barista + Blender. Best is to ask the Barista developer to make some videos if not already done?
