This visual novel is my hobby project, I don't expect to earn thousands of dollars by developing it, so I don't plan to invest in new hardware anytime soon. I use a few years old laptop with GeForce 960m and 4GB RAM.
So for my scenes I have to find a compromise between quality and rendering time.
In my free time I create story and Daz Studio scenes, rendering usually runs during my normal work or other activities.
Sometimes I get into a situation where rendering time limits me because I am able to create scenes faster than render.
I usually use denoiser in the last iterations of rendering.
The following example shows render after 100 and 1000 iterations. 1000 iterations is the number I currently use in many scenes.
Do you think that the difference in quality is worth using about ten times longer rendering time?
100 iterations
1000 iterations
100 is of course a very small number of iterations, but I use it as an example to illustrate the differences.
I don't plan to reduce the number of iterations in my scenes 10 times, but some reasonable reduction could speed up development time sometimes or it would allow me to include more renderer.
Edit: adding 400 iterations example.
400 iterations
The same settings and using denoiser ad the end. The quality difference between 100 and 400 iterations appears to be quite noticeable in some places, but not so much between 400 and 1000 iterations.