[Bf-committers] Cycles Progressive Refinement Checkbox Tooltip *somewhat* ambiguous

[Sergey Sharybin]

The issue here is that basically slowdown depends on particular hardware
configuration, tile settings and device used to render (GPU/CPU). Meaning,
on modern CPU i've noticed around 20% slowdown peak, which is not that bad
as 100%. So what i'm trying to say here, is that if we'll provide
information "up to 100% slower" it might just scary artists and they
wouldn't use the option at all, even though for their configuration
slowdown wouldn't be so bad.

What about more neutral (in my opinion): "could lead to significant
slowdown"?

On Thu, Nov 13, 2014 at 12:22 AM, Simon Repp <simon at fdpl.foundation> wrote:

> Dear Renderistas,
>
> I only recently found out that progressive refinement in Cycles
> rendering (which the corresponding checkbox's tooltip describes to be
> "somewhat slower" than bucket rendering) in fact can impose performance
> penalties of over 100% (aka the same amount of samples takes more than
> twice as long to render).
>
> Now I don't know if this is just a personal flawed interpretation of the
> english language on my part, but when reading "somewhat slower" I didn't
> realize what I was really in for, and in retrospect I'd rather not
> reconstruct how many days my poor laptop spent in excess to render some
> projects I did in the past.
>
> I'd hereby like to propose a change of this tooltip to something less
> ambiguous, lest anyone else falls into that same trap that I have - My
> proposal for this would be to include actual figures describing the
> possible speed penalty that progressive refinement can impose, that is,
> something along the lines of "renders [a]% to [b]% slower depending on
> the scene", where figures [a] and [b] are ideally derived from real
> world data we gather (or already have?) about how much speed penalty
> progressive refinement can impose in different scenes. Alternatively,
> only stating "up to [x]% slower" would work as well I guess, as the main
> point is to make people aware that it _can_ possibly affect render times
> _significantly_.
>
> If the proposal to include figures is not agreeable for some reason, I
> would at least ask for a more indicative wording than "somewhat slower",
> which even after consulting multiple dictionaries I'm not sure if there
> is an official interpretation for. (One dictionary suggests "quite" as a
> synoym, another "slightly" ...) I'd still prefer the figures though, no
> one looks up terms in the dictionary while using Blender and I am
> probably not the worst offender at massacring and misunderstanding the
> english language in the Blender community, and it doesn't get less
> ambiguous than numbers anyway, so I say we use them here? :)
>
> Best,
> Simon
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-- 
With best regards, Sergey Sharybin