Cycles Smoke render - Extremely poor performance & crashes I have a decent new build: 3700x + 2x 5700XT, 32gb ram, using 2.81.

I thought smoke rendering for a fairly simple scene would be a breeze (excuse the semi-pun) but for a render of a scene containing a small cube with volume scatter at 1080p, Blender just grinds to a halt and then crashes. The max resolution I've had a successful render at is 640x320!

This is only at 50 samples too.

(I'm using an HDRI for world lighting, plus 2 or 3 small lights dotted about)

Does anyone have any idea how to improve things in this area?

In all other aspects, my new build is blazing fast at Blender.

Thanks in advance,

Jon
OK, just for reference, I found the problem - it was the Volumes settings!

I had them at the default of Step Size: 0.1 &amp; Max Steps: 1024

It was killing my machine at this setting.

So I changed it to Step Size: 5 &amp; Max Steps: 16 and it's MUCH better now! Only a very small noticeable difference in smoke quality too.