Render Quality

Render Quality defines the density of rays used to evaluate the lens system. It directly influences how accurately light interactions such as ghosts, diffraction, dispersion, and fine ringing patterns are resolved.

Internally, render quality scales quadratically, meaning that increasing the value results in a much larger increase in the number of rays being traced.

Quadratic Scaling

Because render quality scales quadratically:

Doubling the render quality results in roughly four times more rays
Small increases can have a large impact on performance
High values should be used only when necessary

This makes render quality one of the most performance-critical settings in the lens system.

Typical Render Quality Ranges

Different lens systems require different quality levels to produce clean results:

Low complexity systems
Render Quality 10–20 is often sufficient
Medium complexity systems
Render Quality 30–70 may be required to resolve ghosts and fine details
Extreme cases
Render Quality values up to 100 can be used, but at a significant performance cost

There is no single correct value. Optimal render quality depends on the complexity of the lens system and the level of detail required.

Performance Considerations

Because render quality scales quadratically, excessively high values can place significant pressure on GPU memory.

If Render Quality is set too high, the plugin may run out of VRAM. When this happens, some ghosts may fail to render entirely, resulting in missing or incomplete flare elements.

To push the lens system further using higher render quality while keeping ghosts rendered, you can enable Render Stability mode.

Render Stability Mode

Render Stability mode reduces VRAM usage at the cost of lower performance.

When enabled:

GPU memory consumption is reduced
Ghosts are less likely to disappear due to VRAM exhaustion
Overall rendering becomes more stable at high quality settings

This mode is especially useful when:

Working with very high render quality values
Using high wavelength counts
Rendering complex lens systems with many ghosts

Because of the reduced VRAM footprint, Render Stability mode allows you to push settings such as wavelength count further than would otherwise be possible.

Practical Advice

Use normal rendering during look development for better interactivity
Enable Render Stability mode when pushing extreme quality settings
Monitor both performance and ghost completeness when increasing render quality

This trade-off gives you finer control over memory usage versus render time, making it possible to achieve higher-quality results without losing ghost detail.

Practical Tip

If artifacts appear:

Increase render quality incrementally
Observe the impact on both visual quality and performance
Stop increasing once artifacts are resolved

This approach helps maintain a balance between realism and efficiency.