Six Hundred samples!?!?!?! ~falls over in a dead faint~

I don't use BPT either, and my old laptop only had a CPU. I think the largest number of samples I've ever used was about 50. Currently I do SF renders with 40 samples and a bucket size of 100. I know that's larger than a lot of folks recommend for the bucket, but I read somewhere once to make the bucket size a number that the final render size can be easily divided by so, for instance, with an 800x1000 pixel render, 100 divides into each completely. I think the person who posted the comment mentioned using a number that doesn't divide evenly leaves extra small buckets around that still need to be rendered when the rest of the image is done.

Anyway, this new puppy is speedy with 6 cores instead of 4, and 16GB of RAM instead of 8, so one of my renders, which used to take about an hour now only takes about 12-14 minutes. A test render, usually with 20 samples, used to take 20 minutes, and now takes less than 5 minutes. I think the hardware plays a very large part in how long it takes to render an image.

Of course, most of the renders I do are while beta testing for vendors, so not full scenes as it were. I think one of the first SF renders I did that was a full scene with a HDRi took about an hour and a half, and I thought THAT was way too long. I don't think I'd ever have the patience to let something render over night.

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OK . . . Where's my chocolate?

Butterfly Dezignz