This discussion encouraged my to buyI have been using denoising since I was making fan arts for Vae Victis. That's why you don't see any noise in my renders. However, even with denoising, the quality or the sharpness of the renders are still affected by the convergence rate. When you add volumetrics to the scene, it takes very long to reach a high convergence rate. You can just use the denoiser at a relatively low sample or convergence rate, but that will make everything very blurry. It is still a problem in my renders. Some look quite crisp because it doesn't take long to reach a high convergence rate in some scenes, whereas in scenes like the milk tea shop, where there are lots of reflective surfaces, I just used renders with a low convergence rate.
Edit: I should have mentioned the denoiser I use is the default one that comes with Iray. I read that only it has access to depth information, because you have the entire scene open with it, whereas other denoisers can only work on the image as just a flat surface.
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, which is amazing for me. If you want me to denoise your images, talk to me.