Cycles is painfully slow even for the simplest of scenes Google shows that Blender's slow rendering has been questioned numerous number of times before too, but in my case it has gone to a degree that rendering even the simplest things requires ages. I'm using latest 2.78a version on Windows 10.

I understand that my machine is a humble one by any stretch (i5 + 8GB + Samsung 850 Pro SSD), but my expectation was that simple scenes involving a few cubes, one light source, one camera and a handful of materials would render in about a couple of minutes or less. Instead it takes the likes of 15 to 20 minutes every time I press F12 (blender says the scene has 1 lamp, 5 objects, 63 faces and 72 vertices, which I believe is pretty simple).

I have tried the following already. Doesn't make a considerable difference in rendering time:


Changing from CPU to OpenCL: throws error when loading libraries.
Changing Sampling: From 128/32 to 12/6.
Changing Light Bounces: From 12 to 4.
Changing Tile Size: From 64 to 256.


My gut feeling is that this has something to do with Windows 10, but I don't have Windows 7 or XP right now to test if that is the case. Has anyone else experienced this? Any other solutions to make it faster?
Make sure you dont have "Square Samples" checked.