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Weird Tip To Improve Render Time

Published December 31, 2015 by Moby

An example of an image rendered on a RAM disk. It is a tower collapse simulation rendered in Luxrender, with orange plastic balls flying at it

So I just found a way to cut down the render time on some of my larger scenes with high numbers of objects. For a typical frame that took 60 seconds to render, about half of this was spent exporting the scene. Now I remember that before I used an SSD, the time spent on this step was even more substantial. Always wanting to take things one step too far, I asked myself how I could speed up this export step even further, and the answer was obvious. Use a RAM disk!

It cut down total render time to 50 seconds from 60. The improvement was in the file export step as I predicted – this went from 22 seconds to just 12. I then moved my Blender and Luxrender directories to the disk too to see if I could squeeze out a few more seconds, and render time went down to 48 seconds.

Now let’s hope I remember to move my files back before I restart my computer!

Published in Tutorials

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  • danstermeister

    Fantastic idea! Do you use AMD’s ramdrive software?

    • Thanks, no I linked to the one I used in the post! I’ve actually found a better way since then, but I haven’t had time to write about it yet. It can reduce the time to load the scene from 30- 40 seconds to just 1! Are your objects duplicates of each other, like these planks? If so, make sure they’re “instanced”, they’ll be regarded as the same and load much more quickly. Also saves a lot of RAM

  • Mr. Joe

    Maybe having that export location on the RAM disk as a cloud drive? Just like you described in your “Dropbox Render Farm”-Video. Frames would be written as fast as the RAM disk allows and then automatically uploaded to the cloud service.

    • Great idea! Speed it up as much as possible