Since the release of the final beta and, subsequently, the final release of TG2, I have noticed that certain sunlight rays produce very grainy shafts of light no matter what quality level I set on the atmosphere or the clouds. In previous releases, it seemed I was able to tweak out most of grain by raising the atmosphere quality value to at least 100. Now, I can't seem to get rid of the atmospheric grain on even 256 quality. Did something change in this final two releases that would have affected this? Here is a link to my sample image on Flickr:
Click the image to see the full sized image.
I'm trying to figure out if it's the atmosphere quality setting or the cloud quality setting that's modifying this grain. I have increased the quality settings on pretty much everything to the maximum slider settings (and gone above that in some instances) for each object. Yet, still no major change. I'd really like the upper shafts of light to be much less grainy than this.
Here are my render settings:
Detail 1, AA 3, GI Detail 3, GI Samples 3, GI Blur 8
The reason I have hesitated turning up the GI settings is that for each whole number value up, it seems to raise the render time by at least a factor of 2. So, I'd prefer this to not become a 5-7 day render even on my Core i7 (recently upgraded). I have tried this with both ray-traced and non RT shadows and still the grain persists. Note that when I turned on traced shadows, the render time went from about 2 hours to over 20 hours.
Any ideas?
Thanks.
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Brian Wright