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smooth polygons essentially does what?

i thought it was for lower res characters to help hide the facets in the mesh.

i did turn off visible in ray tracing. i'll turn off smooth polygons too as suggested since the figure used is a higher res mesh.

should i leave remove back facing polygons on?

also i noticed that the first render i did was 3000 x 3000 but still soft as if blurry. what would have caused that?

Smoothing the facets is what it's supposed to do. In practice it seems to often leave those lines where the polygons join together. I think it's broken, but it doesn't seem to always show. The lighting also seems to affect it.

You can turn it off easily just for the background if you like. That seems to be where the problem is.

As far as the blurriness goes, that's a separate problem and I don't have a clue.