Why does Cycles indicate such huge render times left to go?

Question

When running a render in Cycles, the numbers on the top of the screen indicate a huge amount of time left to go. Why is this? I want a quick render.

  • Martin Bergwerf replied

    Hi Erik,

    There are many factors that influence the Rendertimes, but:

    if you make an actual Render, the easiest way is to use a time limit and if it's a Viewport Render, you can increase the Noise Treshold:

    Speed.png

  • Omar Domenech replied

    We all want quick renders. That is why probably real time will win the race and be the default mode, no more ray casting.

    You can also reduce the resolution of your render if what you are after is a quick preview render. Also the light bounces influence render times, you can drop those. What you can't expect is to have all the settings at full and high resolution and have quick render times, for that you need a super computer and expensive one.

  • Adrian Bellworthy replied
    Like Spikey says, there are many factors that dictate how long renders take.
    You may find working in Eevee a better option for faster renders, however you will need to work within the limitations of Eevee.

    There are many things you can do to speed up rendering with Cycles, like a time limit, increasing the noise threshold and adding a Denoise node in the compositor, any many more.

    If you want to give more details of your render settings and scene, we may be able to suggest some other options.

    Remember, Cycles is Blender’s physically-based path tracer for production rendering. Unlike Cycles, Eevee is not a raytrace render engine. Instead of computing each ray of light, Eevee uses a process called rasterization. Rasterization estimates the way light interacts with objects and materials using numerous algorithms.