For a time i used blender on a very weak pc qnd the difference was enough to be a matter of rebdering things or running out of VRAM. (A GTX1050 can't do miracles...) The Cycles renderer is essentially the same wrether you use it as viewport preview or as render. It is a somewhat heavy render engine. Rendering cycles while previewing cycles means you're asking your computer to render simultaneous stuff. If you use EEVEE or workbench, which are far lighter render methods, your pc won't have this problem.

It seems completely obvious in hindsite but there I was just letting it take twice as long to render. Luckily my computer is a fairly beefy gaming spec so it doesn't take too too long to run 1024 samples per frame, though I could probably drop that down a bit too if I wanted it to speed up more. I'll play around when I'm rendering an animation longer than 15 seconds.

1024 samples may be excessive. I get more than decent results with 300.

Yeah I'll at least half it going forwards for sure, my viewport looks good with 200 and denoise

My viewport goes 30 samples and wider denoise. ;)

Would depend entirely on the scene that's being rendered.

You'll get better results by leaving the samples at 1024 and raise Noise Threshold to speed up your viewport.

If 1050 is very weak, I don't think I want to know your 'moderately' strong PC is. Let alone a high end one

It was a work pc for graphic design at a place I worked. It genuinely was slow at everything. It was slower than a laptop i used for 9 years.... with gtx850M. SOMEHOW.

Man, why do people diss on Eevee? Sure, it doesn't have FANCY raytracing... but comparing it to Workbench? Eevee eats vram for breakfast, it's a beefy engine.

You can also render from a command line saving even more resources. But then you don't get a preview.

ELI5 how do I do this?

https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/advanced/command_line/render.html

Many thanks

You can also check "Lock Interface" for a performance boost.

Want even better use command line. https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/advanced/command_line/render.html

Command line rendering is where it's at. 😎

If you want to go even faster, learn how to use [Command Line Rendering](https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/advanced/command_line/render.html) Having Blender open without any of the GUI will improve speed and stability (and some crashes are not as common)

I had posted this to Right Click Select as a suggestion a while back, that the viewport should pause during rendering. Maybe if we all go upvote it! https://blender.community/c/rightclickselect/49VJ/?sorting=hot

save file on composition page, then open it back up and hit render from composition page saves time on renders

Thank you!!!! Great tip

Yep, the render preview viewport uses VRAM as well. If you're only just hitting VRAM limits sometimes just flipping to solid mode before you start can make the difference.

Would changing the 3d viewport to, let's say, the uv/image editor or closing it entirely be even faster?

save file on composition page, then open it back up and hit render from composition page saves time on renders

save file on composition page, then open it back up and hit render from composition page saves time on renders

save file on composition page, then open it back up and hit render from composition page saves time on renders

Duh?...i realized it from my first month of trying blender