My Cycles render quality is terrible

My cycles render quality is terrible. I get fuzzy images not nearly as crisp as what I see in nearly any tutorial. I’m not running terrible hardware either,

Blender 2.61
Win7
NVIDIA 560 Ti
i5 2500k
8gb ram

I’m using the default settings, in CPU mode. (I see a lot of videos with GPU mode as an option, but I don’t have that selection).

I’ve attached the common monkey snapshot edited in graphics program to have a strong border for contrast and a zoom on some of the speckles I’m getting.

Fancier images get a lot worse, even after hundreds of passes.

I’ve applied the same “zoom” on this image.

The blue…thing in the vase, is the water. I just shrunk it down and moved it up, in preparation for this image, so that I could be 110% certain it was not overlapping with the glass in any area and causing artifacting in that way.

Any tips on why my render quality, with default settings, is so terrible? ._.

Thanks for any help.

Attachments



increase the samples
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/Render/Cycles/Integrator

“hundreds of passes”? Only very simple scenes like old default 2 monkey on cycles before merging can clear noise that fast. Real complex scenes require tens of thousands of passes to clear noise.