- Subdivision Level 1: 80,712 polys; peak memory 5.195 GB; 192 secs
- Subdivision Level 2: 322,842 polys; peak memory 5.297 GB; 200 secs
- Subdivision Level 3: 1.3 million polys; peak memory 5.540 GB; 207 secs
- Subdivision Level 4: 5.2 million polys; peak memory 6.646 GB; 221 secs
- Subdivision Level 5: 20.7 million polys; peak memory 30.2 GB; 240 secs
Peak memory rising with each SDS level, yup that's expected; you're keeping track of more polys at each level. The scene frames take longer to load as SDS level increases, and that's also expected; you're doing more and more computations to generate the SDS polys prior to rendering. But how is it that SDS level 5 (with 256 times the polys of SDS level 1) only takes 25% longer to actually render?
Honestly, even when the camera is right next to my model I can't spot any smoothing issues above level 3, and barely above level 2. If there really is such a low memory and time penalty for higher SDS levels (at least below level 4), why wouldn't I just leave the SDS at level 3? I'm just curious how it's possible that the renderer barely slows down between the intermediate SDS levels.