The direct lights are usually much smoother and with higher dynamic range than indirect lighting. Using the R11B11G10 float format exhibit color shifts and banding even in simple setups without a way to mitigate the issue. Using RGB9_E5 encoding improve the quality while retaining the storage benefit of 32bit formats. The added overhead of the software encoding not perceptible in a full lighting pass. This affects direct lights and SSS convolution result. Fix #121937 Pull Request: https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/122515