I forgot to say that here you can download Linux portable experimental build (thanks to jensverwiebe):
Go to (Sampling) and put scrambling distance to 0 .
Not saying this is the case but maybe they wanted to increase interactivity with viewport rendering. Most of those optimizations sound like they could potential increase biasing in the final image.
Thanks, @SpdB3d.
Okay, that’s a bit better. Render time dropped from 1:03.34 to 42.34, an improvement of 21 seconds (about 33% faster).
Any other suggestions? It would be nice to see that 10x factor. 
Depending on the scene the AO simplify will change the speed quite dramatically. On the standard classroom at full bounces scrambling distance at 1 I went from 3 minutes to under 1:30 by doing the AO simplify
Thanks for making that clear, that made quite the difference!
Odin
thanks for bringing a focus on to this. I did not follow the denoise as closely.
this is terrific news
BTW what GPU do you use for your rendering?
it does not work with F12 ???
on viewport its like seconds and in actual rendering it goest above 1 min
Ummm… where’s that now? I’ve looked through Render, Render Layers, Scene, World and Object and I don’t see anything labeled “AO Simplify.”
Hi It seems my graphics card GT630 (a cheap 100 pounds one) supports only CUDA 2.1 I think. I am not that familiar with hardware etc. Any ideas if there will be a build with denoiser that supports Cuda 2.1 ? How about blender 2.8? Didn’t I read an article about supported cuda’s for 2.8?
guys is it working with actual image render ??? can someone please confirm?
It does work with f12… If you are using ao it has a value for render and viewport
LOL! And here I was looking for “Simplify AO.”
Anyway, here are my results so far with my test scene:
Blender Version
Render Time
2.78c official release
1:03.34
2.78-82bcfb9 (no special settings)
1:14.68
2.78-82bcfb9 (Scrambling Distance: 0)
42.34
2.78-82bcfb9 (above + AO Bounces: 1)
30.45
Okay, this is impressive. Not quite 10x, but still pretty good… almost as fast as the last renders I did in BI for my test scene (but they were only a few seconds faster, maybe three).
And here’s an example render (settings are the last entry in the table)
I was just sitting here thinking about how far 3D viewport rendering has come since I started in 3D in 1987/88, from tri-only geometry, wireframe that took nearly two minute to refresh with a mere 500 or so triangles to… well, this… near real-time rendering with 26,000+ four-sided, smooth-shaded and subdivided polygons, cast shadows, etc. etc.
Just fricking amazing.
Well my demo doesnt have denoising… Its a post thing so you could go 1 step farther and denoise what you saw in my demo. Also im using a single GTX 1070 in the video. I have 2 1070s and a 970
Even Cycles itself has advanced a lot since its initial debut in a branch (even if you just count the optimizations and sampling improvements it has seen),
A lot of scenes that would’ve required 100 hours to render back then can now be done in a fraction of the time using the same hardware (at least if the CPU was used). The advances being seen in the experimental branch is poised to make the engine several times faster yet, providing that Lukas has the time to get them into a commit-ready state).
And it’s impressive that you have decided to stick with 3D for all of those years with the early limitations not scaring you off (a good chunk of BA users today were not even born yet, myself included though I entered the world not long after you started).
I’ve tested it and it’s a cool feature, thank you !
Hi, it looks freaking awesome! especially limited texture size, but I have a problem when I try to use two or more GPUs. anyone else has this problem? thanks
edit : problem is just in preview render, F12 looks good
I´ve tested it in several scenes and it speed up my renders at least two times, great !