Denoiser Issue?

[cerakecera]

Hello
I have an issue regarding the way the denoiser are applied. In previous versions the denoiser calculated at the end of the render, but now it does it during the render progress, which increases render time.
Dont know, if this is a new feature, or a bug.
How to revert to previous behaviour?
Recorded the issue

https://mega.nz/file/vg9CSbKL#PLsUdmSH8du1VBi_EMMHlASQzTfr0RpyyMcdazfQTcs

[Stephen.Blair]

It's a feature, requested by users

[cerakecera]

How to revert to previous behaviour?
Want to render animations and have the denoiser just calculate the finished render. This way its unnecessarily increases the render time.

[Luca_F]

+1 .. it would be great to have the possibility to choose between the two behaviours. I agree with cera kecera: the great feature to render animation frames denoised just when the frame was copmletely rendered .. it was simply a wonderful timesaver. (saving many of my deadlines)

[thiago.ize]

As Stephen mentioned, it's a feature so you can see what your denoised image looks like.

If you render with progressive mode enabled, I agree there currently is a bit of overhead since the denoiser is run after every progressive pass (we'll look into optimizing that in our internal ticket ARNOLD-11760). But progressive already has other overheads baked in, so you shouldn't be using progressive if all you care about is render time. If you disable progressive, you'll still get the denoiser running during and at the end of the render, but the overhead is greatly minimized, especially on many-core machines, because it's only using a single cpu core.

What's more, if all you care about is final frames and aren't doing IPR, I suggest batch rendering (I don't know if maxtoa allows that without a paid license) so that nothing is displayed to screen. It just renders straight to disk. Since nothing is displayed to screen, the denoiser is only run at the end of the render.

[strg6004]

???
Why is the previous way the denoisers worked replaced by this requested one in the first place?
Why not leave us the choice and keep both variants?
Why make things worse, when it was a good thing and make us force to do a workaround?
Why make this obvious downgrade and pretend its not?
Why make this renderer slower and not faster???

Why, why, why???

PLEASE undo this nonsense or give us the choice!
We have DEADLINES to keep, JESUS!

[strg6004]

Nope, no change if progressive is checked or unchecked, same decreased render time...
And nope again, saving render time is NOT a bad thing!
Sorry, but your post does sound that way

[Stephen.Blair]

How can it slow down batch renders? You have an Arnold license, aren't you batch rendering?

[strg6004]

You dont worry about my license, i pay good money for Autodesk products for over 10 years! And since a couple of years, Arnold is part of it...
So spending money for the development of this renderer, you tell me now to just use that crappy and buggy batch rendering instead of something advanced, which we all pay to develope???
Jesus, the arrogance!

Watch this and tell us again to just switch!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=deARCSVtIHw

You cant make decisions for us, leave us the choice, dont make this better for some users and worse for others. Bring back the old way the denoiser work, thanks!

[Stephen.Blair]

For batch rendering, I mean using 3dsmaxcmd. What's buggy about that?

You can use whatever render manager you want. But if you're rendering on a single machine, you don't necessarily need one.

I'm not worried about your license. But you need a license to batch render. Many people posting here don't have an Arnold license so batch rendering is not an option.

No arrogance here.

[strg6004]

Whats the DIFFERENCE??? Its an ancient way of rendering, you cant see render progress of a frame or overall sequence, monitor render time of current frame, ETA, zoom in out, etc...
And no since last update, we cant use whatever we want. You took that choice from us by replacing new denoiser feature with previous one!

[strg6004]

Lets make this short: I dont want to use any other rendering manager, i want to render my stuff the way it was in previous versions, i dont want to waste time thanks to the new denoiser feature, which adds up to a third of render time, i dont want anything new and i want to have the choice which feature to use!!!

So do we get the old way the denoiser works or not??? No changing the subject, please.

[thiago.ize]

The caveat in my answer is that GPU rendering is always progressive, so GPU will always be slow unless you batch render.

In any case, this slowdown when in progressive mode is extreme and I agree needs to be fixed. I'm hoping we can do that in a future arnold release without the need for disabling denoising during the render.

One other point, there are two types of progressive rendering. One is for the negative AA (the blocky pixels at the start of the render) and the other is for the positive AA. I'm referring to the positive AA.

[thiago.ize]

Apologies, I was thinking you were talking about the Intel Open Image Denoise imager (introduced in arnold 7) or the optix denoiser imager. The arnold noice denoise imager works in a different way to other imagers with respect to how it uses the computer's CPU and yes it will very likely introduce a sizeable overhead if used in a non-batch render with or without progressive rendering. I've made an internal ticket (ARNOLD-11761) for fixing this.

[thiago.ize]

Speaking of the intel denoiser (https://docs.arnoldrenderer.com/display/A5AF3DSUG/Imager+Denoiser+Oidn) I suggest giving it a try as it's much faster, easier to use, and might even give better results.

[strg6004]

You got it all wrong

I am using OIDN with GPU and its wasting one third of render time, due to the new way its denoising during render, which is nonsense for people using Arnold to render sequences...

Seems like your colleague wont/avoid answer, so im asking you:
Are you people going to insist to keep it this way???
Or revert it back the way it was in previous versions with the option for both features???

I can just repeat myself over and over again, leave us the choice which way we want the denoiser to be applied!
Hope to get an answer this time, thanks!

[thiago.ize]

Great, I think we now have all the info for what you're doing. As I mentioned earlier, GPU rendering always runs in progressive mode, progressive mode currently has some imager overhead, and we're hoping to get this fixed in our internal ticket ARNOLD-11760. I can't give an ETA for when this performance regression will be fixed, but I agree with you that it's a serious performance hit for all imager users (denoise and other types of imagers), so it's high priority and I'm hoping we'll be able to solve this sooner rather than later.

[strg6004]

Good, glad atleast you are considering this an issue!

But how about giving us a hotfix until you got the performance issue solved?
You know, revert back to previous version with the option to choose denoiser feature...
Im just repeating myself right right now, because there is still no answer to this question!

[cerakecera]

Hello
I like to ask about an update regarding the denoiser unnecessarily increasing render time. This matter should not be forgotten, so im forced to bump the thread again. Find a solution, please.

[Stephen.Blair]

We're working on it. I can't be any more specific.
As Thiago wrote:
we'll look into optimizing that in our internal ticket ARNOLD-11760