Ryan-M

Area lights and punctual lights on a single object are never used simultaneously. If the "Use Area Lights" checkbox is checked (it is by default) then the emissive surfaces on the fixture produce light. If it is not checked, then the punctual light sources produce light. Punctual lights specify lumens which quantify total power output. Emissive materials specify power per area (e.g. candela/square meter). This makes it generally more difficult to work directly with emissivity. An emissive material applied to a small bulb will produce significantly less light in your scene than the same material applied to a large bulb. We wanted to allow people to continue to work with lumens. The "Apply Emissive and Color from Light(s)" checkbox allows the emissivity of the emissive material(s) on a fixture to be derived from the lumens specified in the punctual lights on the fixture. If you have a fixture with a single point light that produces 1200 lumens and the "Apply Emissive and Color from Light(s)" checkbox is checked, then Chief will automatically calculate the appropriate emissivity of the emissive materials on the fixture such that all of the emissive surfaces on the fixture output a total of 1200 lumens. The point light itself won't cast light, but its intensity (and color) will inform the properties of the emissive surfaces that make up the area light. When "Apply Emissive and Color from Light(s)" is checked, Chief uses the sum of the punctual light sources on a fixture as the means by which you dictate the total power output of a fixture. When you uncheck that box and directly configure the emissivity of a material you're no longer working in lumens, and it is correct that you will have to specify values much larger than typical lumen values in order to get the same results. In general, I would recommend leaving that checkbox checked.

3D grass is not supported in CPU ray trace views.

Are you asking for something like an added area light (where it produces light but isn't necessarily a visible part of the model), or just the ability to more easily create area lights of basic shapes? Can you do the work to create an emissive face/rectangle with a specific orientation once and then add it to the library for future use?

The pixelation through the windows in your first two images look similar to an issue that we addressed in the 26.2 release. I believe you can still get it to happen, but my understanding is that it will only happen if your plan is very far from the origin so that might be something to check. In your last image with the water, it looks like poor denoising (on the water itself). X16 sometimes struggles to remove noise on transparent (refractive) surfaces. We expect this to be improved in X17.

You are not the only one and we have contacted AMD about this. For now, rolling back to an earlier driver is the appropriate solution to the problem.

We have reproduced this on specific laptops with switchable graphics. The only way we have found to work around it is to disable the Intel card on the machine. The safest way to do this is via the HP Omen Gaming Hub software. Steps may vary depending on your specific machine, but I've attached images illustrating the process that works on the machine that we have. Specifically, you want to switch from the Hybrid GPU mode to the Discrete GPU mode.

In the context of ray tracing, we have seen performance scale approximately linearly with core count when comparing the same tier of hardware. A 12-core M2 will be about half as fast as a 24-core M2. A 12-core M3 will be about half as fast as a 24-core M3. There is a fairly significant jump from M2 to M3 (for example, a 12-core M3 is more than twice as fast as a 12-core M2) due to the introduction of dedicated ray tracing hardware. The most powerful M2 Studio probably isn't going to perform better than the most powerful M3 MacBook Pro when it comes to ray tracing. I can't speak as much to non-rendering performance as we don't really have similar benchmarks. It is comparatively simple to benchmark ray tracing performance in Chief. Outside of that, there are so many unique operations with different performance characteristics that it would be difficult to quantify in the same way.

Yes. This is good to know, we don't have that card in-house.

I believe the original benchmarks were Nashville, Kitchen 1 at 1400x860 (don't ask me why, we were profiling the Mac at the time and I'm pretty sure this was the resolution I got by default on an MBP). Please bear in mind that the numbers Trent posted were from a specific build relatively early on in X16 and that exact samples/sec in the current version may have changed somewhat since then.

In my recent benchmarking, a desktop 4070 was about twice as fast as a desktop 3070, and a desktop 4090 was about 2.2x faster than the 4070. This was tested in a specific plan at a specific resolution so results may vary a bit, but in general I would say that a 40-series is a significant improvement over the 30-series.

This is cool, thanks for sharing. Adding more variety to the grass tool (and expanding it to other types of similar foliage) is something we've talked about a lot, and these are good examples of what it could do.

It causes the view to stop rendering when it reaches the specified number of Max Export Samples. In X15 the view will denoise at this point. If it's left unchecked the view will continue to render indefinitely.

So, this is basically a bug. The way that we apply lighting to surfaces viewed through a glass (or any refractive) material is different than the way we apply lighting to surfaces that are directly visible. In X13 - X15 there is a fixed limit on the number of lights that we apply to these kinds of surfaces. This means that some of those lights inside of the cabinet may not actually produce light on the surfaces visible through the cabinet glass. I can certainly understand that this is confusing and not the ideal behavior. This is unlikely to be problem in newer versions of Chief.

My best guess based on what you've described is that your machine is overheating. Chief really shouldn't be able to generate a BSOD even if it wanted to. It's unlikely we'll be able to diagnose a problem with Chief here.

If you're talking about CPU ray tracing, then reference plan geometry won't display. If you're talking about ray traced PBR then it should display. To get it to show up in a CPU ray trace you could export the reference plan as a symbol (e.g. via 3DS export) and import it into the plan you want to ray trace from. This assumes you want your reference geometry to show up with materials. If you want it rendered in a different technique (like Glass House) then I'm not sure you can do that with CPU ray tracing.