What steps should I take to speed up an Eevee render?

Question

I have a pretty beefy PC: RTX 2070, I7-9700K but somehow my Eevee animation ends up taking more than 1 minute per frame yet can render at around 10-50 FPS in the viewport with minimal quality loss compared to the full render, at around the same resolution. So, are there render settings that I should change to make the animation render faster? or is the Eevee render just super broken?

It seems like this is a fairly common problem, brought up in many unsolved questions: Why are my Eevee renders much slower to output than they are in a viewport?

Will it soon be possible to render an Eevee animation in realtime (2.8 Beta)?

Eevee Preview Render from Python

Many have come to the conclusion that either the normal render does more calculations to make a more realistic image, or that it takes time to save the image to the disk.

If it is the first case, what settings can I change to make each render take the same time? I highly doubt it is the second case as it should not take more than a minute to save a 1mb file to my solid state drive.

And yes, I have tried the viewport render, which does speed things up substantially (like more than 50x faster than the regular render), but I'm still struggling to understand why the regular render is taking so long.

Here is a picture of one of the more demanding frames of the animation:

How does your scene look like? What are your render settings? — brockmann, Jun 16 '20 at 22:35
@brockmann 40 samples, the scene is fairly big with a lot of images and models — 10 Replies, Jun 16 '20 at 22:58
If you want a quick and dirty solution without programming and that will probably work, You can F3 full screen your window then use Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) to record the frames as they play out, just hide your grid and mouse and crop and you're good. — 4nof, Jun 21 '20 at 19:22

score 5 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 23 '20 at 04:42

To reduce render time in EEVEE you can try the following steps:

In the screen space reflections menu and turn off refraction and enable Half Res Trace.
In the sampling menu reduce the samples for rendering.
In the output properties panel reduce the resolution of the from a 100% to about 75% or lower.

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 04 '22 at 13:44

I would add to the answer above from my experience. When you render the final animation shaders seem to at least partly recompile each frame, or at least some of the calculations are performed for each render frame from scratch. One often doesn't notice this with Cycles, since the render/tracing itself takes a lot of time. But in EEVEE exactly this becomes a bottleneck.

The most difficult are the procedural materials. So basically if your model is ready and you bake your procedural materials, it may improve the render time pretty significantly.

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Feb 22 '24 at 08:20

I would add to the answer above from my experience. Avoid using 4D prodecural textures as it is quite taxing to compute as compared to 3D textures. Bake any static procedural textures before rendering, just baking the noise textures will give you a massive boost in rendering speed.

When I made a procedural material it was taking 35 sec a frame just to render it but after baking all the static noise textures it went to 3.65 sec a frame.

When working with complex procedural textures use cycles with very low samples to preview it while working.

Don't repeat other user answers without adding any value, and creating a new answer. Use comments of other answers if you want to contribute to that answer. Moreover the OP was asking for EEVEE not cycle. — diramazioni, Feb 22 '24 at 09:34

What steps should I take to speed up an Eevee render?

3 Answers3