That’s right but another word for cloudy noise could be low frequency noise and it says in the min bounces tooltip that the render will come out faster but noisier. It makes a lot of sense since light rays are being terminated when deemed to have no effect on the image but of course even if the light added is low it adds up if millions of rays are made to go at least 6 bounces before being terminated.
Unfortunately compared to Corona there seems to be noise that never goes away with Cycles (unless ridiculous amount of samples is rendered) which makes me use the denoiser for virtually every interior scene I rendered. So for me it’s more important to see how it looks denoised rather than not denoised. I have to point out now though that setting the min bounces higher helps with this quite a lot. It’s not consistent with the start of this column but I may actually try to render some interiors without the denoiser ^…^
Anyway, here are the renders not denoised. It is very visible now how much noisier it actually was 
You can see bounces at 4 to be quite a bit darker but I found that in most scenes it’s not such an issue as here because most scenes are not completely white. What is more interesting is that it rendered a bit faster than 2.8 while being much cleaner.
Also setting min bounces and diffuse bounces to the same number produces less noisy results.
2.79 min bounces and diffuse bounces both at 4
2.79 min bounces and diffuse bounces both at 5
2.79 min bounces and diffuse bounces both at 6
2.8
