Arshvista — Architectural visualisation: render | arshvista.com
The settings worth changing, in the order worth changing them — sample count, bounce depth and denoiser passes, with the defaults left behind.
Start from the knowledge that the defaults are not a target. Cycles ships with 4096 samples for final renders and 1024 for viewport previews; both are worst-case values, and an interior still almost never needs the final-render default.
First change: samples. Set the final count to 128 and enable OpenImageDenoise with the Albedo and Normal passes. The passes let the denoiser tell surface detail from shading noise, which is what makes the 64–128 sample range viable; without them the same count cleans worse.
Second change: bounces. Set diffuse to 4 and glossy to 2 as a baseline, with headroom to 8 diffuse and 4 glossy for rooms with deep corners or heavy mirroring. Dropping diffuse bounces to 1–2 is the single most common cause of black corners in a room render.
On narrow screens, swipe or scroll the plate sideways.
Third change: time budget. A 1920×1080 interior at 512 samples with denoising takes from a few minutes to a few tens of minutes on a current GPU; the same scene at 4096 samples without denoising runs 20–60 times longer. Budget iterations at the low sample count and reserve any increase for the final frame.
For animation the arithmetic is unforgiving: every frame pays the same cost, so the denoised range stops being a convenience and becomes the schedule. The checklist below is ordered so that the cheapest fixes come first.
Exposure and framing sit outside this checklist but inside the same preset — see Archviz Lighting, IES Files and Exposure in Stops for the −0.7 to −0.3 EV window, and Camera, Lens and Crop Conventions in Archviz Images for delivery sizes.
Further reading