Is anyone else now struggling with Panorama rendering times in 2023.2.1 vs 2023.1?

We updated to 2023.2 to take advantage of the Lumen system (an excellent upgrade in the quality of our work - no going back now…), and I notice that Panoramas now take an exponentially longer amount of time to process than when we were using 2023.1.

I did an experiment with an older 2023.1 project, (just 4 panorama scenes, 4K resolution, no “Max Lighting”, no Path Tracing), and it took about 10 minutes to fully render them all and upload to the cloud.

When I opened/converted the same project to 2023.2.1, and processed the same 4 panorama scenes (same workstation, no Lumen rendering, mind you), the same process took 87 minutes!!

Were there new settings introduced in 2023.2 that increase the rendering time? I notice the “Max Lighting” checkbox is no longer an option for panoramas on the Export screen - is it possible that this setting defaults to “on”, without the option to disable? Might just be a bug that needs reporting…

An 8x increase in processing time is a tough pill to swallow, especially when we’ve staked our product on including excellent Twinmotion panorama tours. Worse still is that our newer 2023.2 TM files appear not to have down-save function, so I can’t just hop into the old version to save rendering time…

Anyone else feeling the panorama pain yet?

Same here. But it looks like its only Lumen that takes so long. 30 minutes plus on a 6k lumen render. 4 minutes on a PT render.