10 Tipps – How to render faster in Blender

Blender has two different Denoisers
the IOID Denoiser from Intel, which works with artificial intelligence and delivers remarkable results.

And then there is the Optix Denoiser from Nvidia, which works only with their RTX GPUs. It is the same Denoiser that’s used by every game with Ray tracing and enables denoising right inside the Viewport. Nvidias Denoiser is only Available with RTX GPUs and is faster, but qualitywise Intel’s Denoiser is better.

Using a Denoiser allows you to use fewer samples by achieving the same result. Which there for makes it possible to render faster.

Try to avoid as many polygons as possible and delete unnecessary objects in the scene or hide them.

An additional feature of Blender 2.8 which can help is the Cycles bevel node. Which enables you to create bevels based on a normal map. But the problem here is that it only works for tiny bevels. On bigger bevels, it doesn’t look good.

The Light paths simply set. How often the light bounces from one to another object. Technically more light bounces mean more realism since in reality, the number of bounces is close to infinity especially with glass or in very complex scenes this is the case but most of the times there is no real difference between many or just a few light bounces speaking about the End result. For a simple scene Total: 5 Light bounces should make your scene render faster and don’t change the result.

But here it is the same as with the Denoiser. it’s all about experimenting and getting a feeling for it how it affects your rendering.

The principled Shader not only brings more realism by default, it also brings optimized performance over a recreation of the same Shader. In Blender 2.8 we got Principled hair and Principled Volume beside Principled BSDF, so use them. They are outstanding. What matters is the result and not the afford you put in by creating everything by yourself.

Roughly every 3 months Blender publishes a new Major version of Blender, which not only means additional features, (which also can make Blender render faster) It also comes with a lot of performance improvements.

If you want to stay up to date with the latest version of Blender, you can install it over Steam for the non-gamers of your Steam is the biggest online store for Video games, but it also has other software like Blender in their range.

Cycles is already one of the fastest Render Engines for most use cases.

But there are some cases, where Cycles becomes relatively slow like in indoor Scenes for Scenes with a Lot of Objects for such Scenarios people use Render Engines like Redshift or V-Ray.

And there are some Engines which are faster. Like Eevee or K-Cycles. Some also say, that Octane Render is faster than Cycles, but I can’t confirm that.

Since Blender Version 2.83, there is the Adaptive Sampling feature, which allows Blender to use different sampling rates in the same image.

That means more noisy parts of the Image that require more samples get more samples, but Blender doesn’t waste time in parts of the image which doesn’t require as many samples. Which can make it faster multiple times but also not faster at all. It hardly depends on the Image.

Just check the Box at Adaptive Sampling and you are done. You could also add value for minimum samples or mess with the Noise Threshold but I just leave it how it is.