Ive noticed a lot of renderers let you select bucket size.
I know the "bucket" refers to the amount of pixels each CPU processes at once, so making the bucket bigger makes the little boxes bigger which chug along on the render window, but aside from that, what does changing the size actually accomplish? Is there a considerable speed difference between small and large bucket sizes?
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The difference in increasing the bucket size is more memory consumption. It has to hold that "bucket" in memory until it fully scans that block and then writes it to a scratch disk. You wouldn't take much of a speed hit unless your render is taking all of your available memory and resources.
For me in xnormal, depending on how many polygons the hp has and how much memory I anticipate using, I use bucket size anywhere from the default 16 up to 128 taking into account the texture size I'm baking too and guessing how long xnirmal will take to bake what I gave it.