Rendering seems slow, am I getting the most out of my hardware? So, started my Blender journey yesterday working on a tutorial to create some mountains and animate a fly-through of them. They are made with the A.N.T. mesh tool and microdisplacements. I've worked my way through the tutorial to a point where I'm actually rendering frames, and it's much slower than I anticipated it would be. It's taking 5-7 minutes per frame. I am using Cycles with Auto Tile Size addon, and am using an 8k HDR texture (I think that's how I should refer to it) to light the world.
My PC specs are RTX 3090, Ryzen 3950X and 128GB of RAM. During each frame render, the GPU and CPU are essentially idle until the last little bit when Blender starts actually showing tiles, then my GPU kicks in and renders those out in a matter of seconds. Is that to be expected? Is there any way to get Blender to actually utilize my hardware during the first several minutes of rendering, where it seems like it's just barely using it?
I'm rendering using Cycles in Blender 2.91 and here's a screenshot with what I'm rendering and all of the associated settings.
This is the tutorial that I am following: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSafYNQrodk
Thanks for any insight!
I never used it but the e-cycles plugin might help if you had to keep the subdivision :
https://blendermarket.com/products/e-cycles
« What’s more, thanks to a new option called &quot;Persistent Data&quot;, for fly-through animations where only the camera moves, E-Cycles only needs to do the pre-processing step once for all frames. In the example above, rendering takes just 3 seconds per frame on a single GPU. In this case, the persistent data option saves 7 seconds of pre-processing per frame. »