Taking a look at OptiX 7.3 temporal denoising for Cycles

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I have finally finished the renders. It can be watched at the link below, or can be downloaded from the link below so you don’t have to deal with Google’s compression (Note: You may need to wait a bit for the 4k version of this video to process if you want to stream it rather than download it):

Some notes:

  • The renders were all done at 1080p and upscaled to 4k in Davincii Resolve to get more bandwidth in Google Drive.
  • I tested three different denoising setups. OptiX Standard, OptiX Temporal, and OIDN. Let’s explain each.
  • OptiX Standard is me going into Blender and turning on OptiX denoising with Albedo and Normal maps for the final render.
  • OptiX Temporal is making use of the new temporal denoising feature with the Albedo, Normal, and Vector render passes.
  • OIDN is OIDN 1.4 with prefiltering set to Accurate and making use of Albedo and Normal passes.
  • You will find the name of each render at the bottom of the screen. It will be something like 0.01 - OptiX Standard. The 0.01 is the Noise Threshold setting for that specific render as the sample count was set to 4096 and adaptive sampling was enabled to achieve a specific noise level.
  • As a side effect of adaptive sampling being used, the PMJ sampling pattern is being used.
  • In these renders I had Animated Seed turned OFF. I personally found that having Animated Seed off helped OptiX temporal denoising, so that’s why I did it. However it should be noted that adaptive sampling does kind of act like an animated seed. Although my testing was rather limited and it may in fact be better with Animated Seed turned on (I will do more testing).
  • The frame rate has been increased to 30fps. How noticeable flicker is with each denoiser will change as you adjust the frame rate. So keep that in mind for your own projects.
  • The version of OptiX used is 7.3. I know 7.4 exists, and it may produce better results, but I personally used 7.3 in my testing. I also believe 7.3 is the version of OptiX used by the Blender build bot.
  • The scene used for testing is a slightly modified version of the “Classroom” scene from this site: Demo Files — blender.org

There are more denoising setups that could be tested. Different prefiltering settings of OIDN (None and Fast), a complex multi-pass OIDN denoising setup in the compositor, NLM, NLM temporal denoising, temporal re-projection like Statix talked about, etc. I’m sorry if I didn’t test the specific denoiser you wanted to see.

I will try to run some more tests on more scenes in coming days and post the results here.

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