I have had some problems with my PC. towards the end of the course it was not strong enough for the project. If you do not mind, can you tell me what PC you are using with all your specs. Thank you for an awesome class.
Hi Craig,
It is often a problem with these kinds of 'heavy visuals' software. Have a look at this: https://www.blender.org/download/requirements/
(You might observe that there is some 3D software around, that is a lot faster than Blender, but look at their minimal requirements!)
I must say, that working with a computer that is on the low end spectrum, can even be helpful in learning to, how do I say this: 'save resources'.
I loaded up this industrial scene to adapt into another scene and my PC was struggling a lot, and I think I have a fairly decent beefy computer, so it rarely gets bogs down with a scene. I left it alone, because I wanted to get back to it when I had the time to troubleshoot it, but I believe it has to do with the Ambient Occlusion nodes that are all over the place and the Noise Texture nodes with the detail cranked all the way up to 10. So that's a long way of saying, it's not just your computer Wieland, the scene has something to do with the sluggishness.
Omar's right, I forgot about all those heavy procedural textures.
One thing that you can do is reduce the Detail in all the Noise Textures until you start seeing too much difference; usually a level of 3 or 4 is enough and above that the differences get really small, but the calculations go sky high, The Detail levels grow exponentially, while the visual differences get less, each time you 'level up'. It's one of those 'secret' tricks to save resources, while hardly reducing visual quality.
Also, Mixing everything before a Principled Shader is better (calculation-wise), than using a Mix Shader after two or more Principled BSDFs.
I recorded this course with a GeForce RTX 2080, AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2950X 16-Core Processor (3.50 GHz), 32 GB of RAM
Really interesting insight 
spikeyxxx about detail levels in noise textures. I'll keep that in mind.
about detail levels in noise textures:
Being a bit more accurate; having a Noise Texture of Detail Level 10 is like having 11 Noise Textures of Detail Level 0:
Sometimes it's worth it, but often the difference between higher Level is unnoticeable.
This is not true for other noises, like the Musgrave Texture, where the Detail can make huge visual differences.
Thank you! lot of good info here. I got to a point where I could only view in solid display. I could open material preview and render display, but could not maneuver the 3d viewport camera. also when I rendered an image, blender would crash. I ended up baking Diffuse, Roughness, and Normals to save room. The baking took around 1 hour for each. Thanks again, I will try these other methods.
What I am working on now.
windows 10
Geforce GTX 660
Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2600S CPU @ 2.80GHz 2.80 GHz,
Installed RAM 8.00 GB,
System type 64-bit operating system, x64-based processor
Hey CC!
Your specs are pretty much on the minimum requirements to run Blender. Meaning its capable of general modeling and texturing tasks, However once you get into more complex scenes, higher vertex count, complex mathematical calculations such as volumetric fog, then your system may struggle to keep up.
Do you have Intel's Turbo Boost enabled for the CPU?
This can increase the CPU clock speed from 2.80GHz to around 3.20GHz
It would also be advisable to invest in extra RAM, 8GB is barely enough to run most software these days. I would aim for 32GB, 16GB as the minimum.
The GTX 660 is over 10 years old now, and I believe drivers and support ended in 2021. Most hardware, although still functionable, is considered out dated within 4 years after its release. This is driven mainly by the continuous evolution of hardware and software, and the ability, (or willingness, as this eats away at profit), of manufacturers such as Nvidia to offer long term support.
And lastly, make sure your drivers are up to date. I have Windows automatic updates disabled, because it can slow my computer when it regularly checks for updates continuously all day. I prefer to manually check for updates once a month. By doing this, new updates often have bugs, by the time I update most of these bugs have been fixed.
As said though, I believe Nvidia ended drivers for this GPU in 2021. You maybe wise to try and download the last driver available direct from Nvidia, and stick with that until you can up date the GPU.
Windows will update the outdated GPU driver with its own basic driver, which will probably be worse than the last available from Nvidia.
Disabling Windows auto update will prevent this, when you manually update the drivers you can cancel any video drivers that are listed.
To do this, go to Settings > Updates, and click Pause Updates for 7 Days. The max I think is about 5 weeks.
Ps. It may even be beneficial to use CPU render only, to try eliminating the render time crashes.
It may even be beneficial to use CPU render only
That is only an option when using Cycles, I think; Eevee always uses GPU as far as I know.
Had a GT 630 before (until about one and a half year ago) and that struggled with Eevee and Cycles was slowed down tremendously since Cycles X.
If you are getting a newer GPU (which will probably mean a new computer), also look at the GPU RAM; I believe the 660 has 2GB, that is not a lot (for graphical software). I have 4GB now, but that is still quite low.
That is a lot of good info, it will take a minute to digest. I am a want to be tech guy, so sometimes I struggle with this computer. I do know that it gets hot, and my fan starts making noises. also note I am unable to get the notifications to work on this thread. Thank you all for your help.
CCWieland Sorry for the notification bug. I've documented it for reporting to the webdev team.