Feature Request: Allow setting a minimum sample count for viewport preview playback
Description
Currently, during viewport preview playback, the sample count appears to be fixed at 1 (or effectively behaves as such). This makes it difficult to preview scenes with detailed visual effects, such as small particle animations or subtle lighting changes, since the quality is too low to judge fine details.
There are situations where users might prefer sacrificing some real-time playback speed in exchange for more accurate preview quality. Therefore, Iād like to suggest adding an option to set the minimum sample count for preview playback in the render settings (for example, in Cycles' viewport sampling configuration).
This would allow users to better balance between real-time responsiveness and preview fidelity depending on their workflow.
System Information
Blender Version: 4.5.3 LTS
OS: Windows 11
CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 9800X3D
Memory: 64 GB
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080
1 Comment
I've actually wanted this for a while. It would also just be really nice for people with high-end GPUs to skip displaying the lower samples. If our card can easily render 10 samples in a scene within 1 frame, perhaps it makes more sense to make that the first sample shown.