Branched path tracing

Hello.

I have just found out that branched path tracing is supposed to be a very good thing and that it supposedly hastens your render by 2-3 times and/or reducing noise while at it.

Is there any documentation or guides describing its settings, functionality and issues in detail? Or “enough” detail that I can still use it and know why i crashed when it did?

Speaking of which is it normal that it crashes my Quadro card if I use tile size which is larger than 64?

it is good practice to set tile size to 256x256 when you use you GPU compute unit to render

branched path tracing is good when you want to prioritize certain aspects of your lighting scheme.

http://www.blender.org/manual/render/cycles/settings/integrator.html

Branched path tracing is certainly the more flexible and powerful option but you need to use it in conjunction with Render passes or AOVs. There’s some excellent videos explaining this workflow on CGCookie. You have to be a member to view them, but its well worth it.

Another option is to take a look at the SolidAngle website, the makers of the Arnold Renderer. As I understand it Cycles and Arnold are fundamentally quite similar, they’re both Unidirectional Pathtracers and Arnold gives you access to a similar set of AOVs and sample settings. The workflow outlined on the SolidAngle website, while not exactly the same for Cycles, is nevertheless very useful.

https://support.solidangle.com/display/mayatut/Removing+Noise

As regards crashing, I’ve never experienced any, but then I always use the Progressive Refine option as I like to see the whole image as it renders.