I can get branched path tracing to render faster than normal path tracing, even if normal path tracing has adaptive sampling enabled. It would be insanely fast if adaptive sampling worked in branched path tracing mode, adaptively stopping sampling at different amounts per pass.
Adaptive sampling does work in branched path mode already - at least on a small test scene here (15% speedup with a moderate sample count).
Can you provide more information on your scene setup and parameters or give more details?
definitely having zero effect in 2.9. Try rendering in branch mode with adaptive set to 0.0050 noise threshold, and then try with noise threshold set to 1. Render time should be identical give or take a bit for different background processes running.
Actually you’re right. I didn’t realise it was only working on the AA samples. I had my AA samples low and my sub samples high. I was hoping it would be adaptive per ray type so I could keep AA samples low.