Best Blender Render Settings to Render Faster

Rendering in Blender can be slow even on a good computer, especially when your scene has heavy lighting, large textures, high samples, or many animation frames. The good news is that you do not always need to lower the final quality. A few basic render settings can help reduce render time while keeping the result clean enough for most projects.

This guide covers practical settings such as GPU rendering, noise threshold, denoising, light paths, persistent data, and output format. These settings are a good starting point, but you should always test one frame before rendering the full project.

Render Properties

Before changing everything at once, start with the settings that usually make the biggest difference: switch from CPU to GPU rendering if your hardware supports it, adjust the noise threshold, enable denoising, lower unnecessary light bounces, and use persistent data for animations. These changes are simple, but they often save more time than small random tweaks.

Open blender and head to the render properties, you can find that in the properties tab.

If you can’t find this tab, drag a new tab and switch it to properties tab or press “Shift F7” on your keyboard.

Note that this is only for the cycles render engine, this might not work for other render engines.

Device

Firstly, change your render device from CPU to GPU Compute if you have a compatible graphics card. GPU rendering is usually faster because the graphics card can divide the render into many smaller tasks and process them in parallel.

GPU (Graphics Card): Renders images much faster because it has a lot of cores which divides the render into small pieces. 

CPU (Processor): Slower than the GPU because it has fewer cores.

If you don’t have a graphics card, this option will be gray for you.

Go to Edit > Preferences > System and select the render device based on your GPU. If you have an NVIDIA GPU, try OptiX first. If you have an AMD GPU, try HIP. If the GPU option is unavailable, Blender may not detect a compatible graphics card.

Noise Threshold

Noise Threshold controls when Blender can stop rendering based on how clean the image is. A lower value gives a cleaner result but increases render time.

What it does is that it stops the render when certain level of noise is present or reduced in the render, a lower value will give less noise but it will increase the render time, the perfect value to achieve both quality and performance is 0.1, it works most of the times but if it gives bad results, you can reduce it point zero seven five.

You can keep the samples at 1000 as the noise threshold will stop the render automatically. Set the denoiser to open image denoise and set the quality to high.

These will be your final sampling settings:

Light Paths

The Light Paths settings in Blender's Render Properties control how light behaves during rendering. These values help manage the number of bounces or interactions light can have with surfaces. Adjusting them affects render quality and performance so it's experimental.

The value of total bounces is 12 by default, but you can change it to 8, and it will work fine. Make sure to check your render in the viewport to notice any bugs or glitches. If you find any, try to fix them by changing the value to 9 or 10.

Performance

After that, scroll down and find the performance tab which will be under the film tab.

Go under the acceleration structure menu and you will find “use spatial splits”, enable that.

After that, go under the final render tab and you will find “persistent data”, enable that too.

What this does is that it loads all the texture data for the first frame and it reuses that for all of the other frames thus making it faster.

Generally if a project has a lot of textures and assets, it takes about a minute or two to calculate the textures for each frame, when these options are enabled, the textures are calculated once and are reused for the other frames.

Output

Blender also takes a lot of time to save the output image in png, you can also save some time here by changing it to something that is optimized and fast.

To change it, go to the output properties tab, you will find it under the render properties tab.

Under the output tab, change the file format to open EXR and Codec to DWAA (lossy).

Render Test

These new settings will reduce your Blender render time by approximately 20%.

Here is a test render with the default settings and the new render settings.

There is not a big difference in the quality of the render and the render time is decreased from 21 minutes to 43 seconds.

You can increase the quality of the render by changing the width value under the pixel filter tab, you will find that under the film tab.

Change it to 1.00px and it will give sharper renders. Here is a difference between a higher pixel value and a lower pixel value.

This won’t be enough, and why face all these issues when you can make your Blender render faster with render farms? Render farms are like farms of super high-end computers that divide the render into small pieces and render them at once.

Fox Renderfarm is a Blender render farm and cloud rendering service for artists who need to render large Blender projects faster without relying only on local hardware. It supports CPU and GPU rendering, 24/7 support, and secure project handling as a TPN-accredited vendor. New users can also test the service with a $25 free render coupon.

Check out this video tutorial made by Extra 3d: