VrayLight in portal mode MUST have put on the outside of the room, and not internal, as is the normal practice. The noise will be much less. Well, and of course subdivs for portal mode (which means primary light will be either Sky or HDRI) will need two times greater than for normal VrayLight of the same size.

For quick Exterior preview rendering, you need to put Vray Light in a mode Dome Area Light type and put in to Texture Sky (image, hdr or shader). Other settings are not necessarily touch. In this case, no need to include the GI, and you can see quite quickly lighting and materials. This is how it will turn out, and render final. But! Will be noisy and not very fast. And most importantly - too deep shadows. Making a contrasting picture easily. We should only reduce the gamma in color mapping.

The speed/quality can be adjusted using only 4 parameters:

1. noise threshold in DMC
2. global subdivs mult
3. subdivs at LC (in new VrayC4D it`s can be auto adjusted too)
4. resolution
The rest is not necessarily touch. Auto changes. This applies to all settings Ir map and DMC GI.

And yet! Use DMC AA 1/4. No Fixed!

(c) Saluto