My computer uses the following hardware: Nvidea GeForce RTX 3070 graphics card, AMD Ryzen 5 3600 6-core processor CPU at 3.59 GHz, Samsung PSSD T7 SCSI Disk Device solid state drive, 40gb RAM and the Windows 10 Operating system. I use my computer for rendering animations in blender using mainly EEVEE for the speed but sometimes cycles as well. Can you tell me from my list any potential bottlenecks that could be slowing the rendering down and what I could change to increase blenders rendering performance?
From the hardware side, nothing, you got a powerful computer. So your attention should be on the optimization of your scene and Blender settings. You have to take into account the poly count, save polygons where ever you can, light bounces, if your scene is trapped in a room or on the open space of the 3D view, if you are linking in assets to save memory, if you are breaking your scene into render layers, resolution of your textures, etc.
I also think the RAM might be a problem and a potential bottleneck.
It is recommended to use equal size and make and type of RAM 'sticks'. (even to buy them at the same time, so there is no serial difference) I suspect you have a 32GB and a 8GB (or even worse: 2x16 + 8). Removing the 8GB, unintuitively might make your computer perform better.
Further more, 2 'sticks' is optimal, so, to make 32GB, it is best to use 2x16 and not 1x32 or 4x8 (and certainly not a mess like 2x8 + 1x16).
But rendering animations is always time consuming, so following Omar's guidelines and optimizing your scenes can really make a lot of difference!
It is a decent machine and I am definitely happy with it but just checking that it is setup as well as it could be.
The RAM is 2no. Corsair Vengeance RGB PRO DDR4 16gb listed below:
The rest is 2 sticks of 4gb Corsair RAM (not vengeance) that we had left over at work. The vengeance RAM is positioned 2 slots apart which I believe is a better configuration. I was aware that you shouldn't mix and match different types of RAM but after speaking with some colleagues we thought it might of been better to have the additional 8gb of RAM anyway. If not I will definitely remove it.
My main issue being is that I am struggling to justify using blender for my projects when the render times are so long. I do my very best to optimise my scenes (linking objects, ensuring low poly, low texture res etc. However some of the scenes I make need to be very complex. I am getting some slight criticism for not using something like unreal engine. I have tried to use unreal however I struggle to pick it up and believe it would probably take me a couple of years before I am proficient enough to use it with the work I'm doing anyway.
I've also heard a bit about NVME hard drives and wondered if that would speed up the time it takes blender to write the image files but from what I could gather the speed increase is only very small.
As previously mentioned I use eevee for the speed however it's still not 100 percent a "realtime" render engine (e.g. still does sampling and extra processes to ensure better quality unlike a game engine). I also tried UPBGE to use essentially as a faster rendering engine than eevee, as it can render in realtime like a real game engine however there is obviously some limitations to using this. If anyone has any advice or suggestions I would be happy to hear them.
Well, I guess there's nothing wrong, you're just hitting the limit we all hit, some renders just take a long of time. When it's an animation, every second counts and it's no surprise when an animation takes 5 days straight of rendering. That's when people turn to render farms, SheepIt being one of the go to's.
Nothing technically wrong but I'm always looking for ways to improve my setup and workflow I guess. I did have some success rendering 8k with concierge and blenderFarm for a projection mapped dome. Just wish there was a game engine renderer that was faster than eevee for this kind of stuff.
I would remove the 2 x 4gb, it is more efficient to use all the same RAM, but that is up to you if you think it helps.
And make sure your 2 x 16gb are using slot 1 and 2.
You say they are 2 slots apart, which is the correct setup, but they are also numbered slots, check your motherboard documentation to determine the slot number.
Usually the first slot is the furthest from the CPU, use slot 1 and 3
If you decide to keep the 2 x 4gb, place them in slot 2 and 4.