GPU Global Switches

The Global Switches rollout controls some overrides and global settings.

UI Path: ||Render Setup window|| > Settings tab > Global switches rollout (Renderer set to V-Ray GPU)

Default geometry type – Determines the type of geometry for standard 3ds Max mesh objects. Some objects, such as displacement-mapped objects and VRayProxy, always generate dynamic geometry, regardless of this setting.

Static – All geometry is pre-compiled into an acceleration structure at the beginning of the rendering and remains there until the end of the frame. The static raycasters are not limited in any way and consumes as much memory as necessary.
Dynamic – Geometry is loaded and unloaded on the fly depending on which part of the scene is being rendered.
Auto – Some objects are compiled as static geometry, while others are dynamic. V-Ray makes the decision on which type to use based on the face count for an object and the number of its instances in the scene.

Render displacement – Globally enables or disables V-Ray's own displacement mapping.

Use Render State in IPR – Enabling this option renders particles and hair in the V-Ray GPU IPR with their render count instead of their viewport count. This parameter also affects the Particle flow integration step and some modifiers like TurboSmooth. Anima 4D assets require this option to be rendered in V-Ray GPU IPR. Enabling this option enhances the output, so it is closer to an actual production render but it can also affect the interactivity of V-Ray GPU IPR.

Render maps – Globally enables or disables texture maps.

Don't render final image – When enabled, V-Ray only calculates the relevant global illumination maps (Light Cache). This is a useful option if you are calculating maps for a fly-through animation.

Check for missing files – When enabled, V-Ray tries to find any missing files in the scene and puts up a dialogue listing them, if there are any. The missing files are also printed to the VRayLog.txt file. If the scene is rendered with distributed rendering and if a render server detects missing files, the scene is not rendered. This can be used as a way to prevent wrong buckets from machines that cannot read texture files, etc.

Render hidden lights – Enables the usage of hidden lights.

Light evaluation – Determines how lights are sampled in scenes with many lights.

Adaptive lights – V-Ray chooses only a specified number of lights to evaluate based on what light sources are most likely to affect a shaded point. In V-Ray GPU, the Adaptive lights algorithm works with both Light Cache or Brute Force as the secondary GI engine. Adaptive lights can be very helpful when rendering scenes with many lights and help achieve a clean result.
Full lights evaluation – V-Ray goes through each scene light and evaluates it at each shading point. In scenes with many lights and lots of GI bounces, this leads to a lot of shadow rays being traced and rendering can become extremely slow. 
Light Tree ¹ – V-Ray selects a variable number of suitable finite light sources based on proximity and evaluates only those. This mode may speed up the Light Cache and Brute Force calculations for scenes with lots of lights. It can also reduce flickering due to missed light sources.

Max ray intens. – Suppresses the contribution of very bright rays, which may typically cause excessive noise (fireflies) in the rendered image. The Max ray intensity is applied to all secondary (GI/reflection/refraction) rays, as opposed to the final image samples. This allows fireflies to be effectively suppressed but without losing too much HDR information in the final image. Similar to the Subpixel mapping option, the Max ray intensity introduces bias in the rendered image, as it may turn out to be darker than the actual correct result.

Secondary rays bias – A small positive offset that is applied to all secondary rays; this can be used if you have overlapping faces in the scene to avoid the black splotches that may appear. This parameter is also useful when using the 3ds Max Render-to-texture feature. For more information, see The Secondary Rays Bias example.

Log window – Determines the conditions for showing the log.

Verbose level – Determines what kind of messages are shown in the window:

1 – Only error messages.
2 – Error and warning messages.
3 – Errors, warnings, and informative messages.
4 – All messages.

Log file – Determines the location and the name of the log file. The default log file is %TEMP%\VRayLog.txt

Lock noise pattern – When enabled, the sampling pattern is the same from frame to frame in animation. Since this may be undesirable in some cases, keep this option disabled to make the sampling pattern change with time. Note that re-rendering the same frame produces the same result in both cases.

Native 3ds Max material swatches – When enabled, switches back to the native 3ds Max material preview swatches in Material editor.