I have been building a RnD scene for best way to get hundreds of shaders and thousands of instances and naturally few hundreds of millions of polygons to Render in a SCI-FI City Through (Like in 5th Element) kind a scene for a while now.

Basically, I have section of huge walls, and I populate them by instancing balconies windows etcs to the points.

Then I Duplicate these Subggroups to make extend the scene

My Goal was to figure what I can squeeze out of my i7 with 32GB ram.

In this scene I am using geo lights in a lot of places and I found out that they only look right if they have the PC activated.

I have several issues I would like advice on.

1) Even if I turnoff the Lights with PC they keep haunting me if I render from Render View. They are switched off but they keep coming back. Only way to turn them off is by defining candidate lights manually.

2) I am instancing (for example) building facades or office furnitures with Attribute Create instancefile attribute. Instanced bgeos are packed.
Is this the proper way for this kind of load for instancing.

3) I have a VDB box which I use for fog etc. If this the right way, Should I use the Atmosphere example in the documents.

I will have sample renders tomorrow but here is a screencap.