How do I balance render time and noise in a low end pc?

Specs:

CPU: Intel Pentium G2030 3 GHz, it’s dual core no hyper threading, Ivy bridge(I don’t know if that helps, but still)

GPU: Sapphire AMD R7 240 GDDR5 1GB

Ram: 4 GB of kingston ValueRam 1333 MHz

Monitor(I am just adding this in because… I don’t know really, just for the sake of detail):
Some random Fujitsu 900p monitor, 60 Hz

As of now I can only go to the ends of the spectrum but not in the middle,

This took me 6 minutes to render, 6 MINUTES FOR A SCENE WITH NO HDRI LIGHTING WHATSOEVER, just a cube and a floor


This took me a second to render, fast but very noisy


How do I find a middle ground?

Figure out how many seconds / minutes you would be fine with for rendertime per frame.

Do 100 sample render

Go 100/rendertime * actualtime you are wanting and that would give you an approximate number of samples to do

Clamp indirect 4, filter glossy at .5ish, multi importance sampling on for lights but not for the scene unless you have a more complex global light source, disable reflective caustics, lower light bounces to around 5.
Use google a little more, there are a few good guides out there.

less lights… every light you adds more noise in a way. you kinda have to get a feel for the noise patterns cycles makes to understand what is going on and where the noise is coming from. but that takes time lol

tldr multiple importance sampling is a blessing and a curse

Search for things like Denoiser node trees, there are people sharing the blend files with those nodes in it. It will clean all your noise out of a low sample render… If you tell blender to render to multi channels in the paths option a compositing denoiser mode can then apply things like bilateral blur to every channel, this is way more effective than something like a noise reduction filter in photoshop on the final saved image.
Sounds complicated but look for a tutorial on it and it will become obvious and simple.

I think for a scene like this two bounce or even one bounce should be enough

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