I have spent quite a bit of time lately with exterior rendering. My client is not looking for a lot of fancy site work or backgrounds, but wants the house to be the focus. This is what I came up with for this project after a lot of trial and error and some help from tech support. I don't claim that this is the best it could be, but know how I would have appreciated someone sharing some settings with me.
Here is how I set it up:
Siding is done with profiles, not textures
Rendering is with Ray Traced Mode 20 000 passes
Denoise off
Display lines off
Tone Mapping 90
Anti Alias 6
I haven't done a lot of experimenting with the number of indirect bounces, but that is set at 4
Sun options- Location is Winnipeg, Manitoba, so quite far north, Time December 21, 12:00 PM, when the sun is directly south and quite low in the horizon
I used 1 direct light approximately 30' in front of the house- illuminance 120 000, Position Z 4' 6", Target Z 4'-6"
Here are the lighting settings for a lot of the textures: Roughness 88
Metalness 91
Opacity 100
Relief Depth 95
Uniform 41
Emissive 0
I also turned up the emissive slightly for a couple items, such as the shingles and fascia. It doesn't take much.
Like someone else stated above you can turn off path tracing for making adjustment, or, I change the path tracing to anywhere from 100 to 300 and it refreshes quite quickly and gives a fairly good preview. You could also turn Denoise on if you are only doing a couple hundred passes.
I am sure some of you have perfected this much more, but this could be a starting point for someone trying to learn how to do the Ray Tracing