Speeding up rendering

[Novalak]

How does one speed up rendering on my PC? My laptop takes between 5-10min to render a complete song

Is the timing normal?
How does one speed it up
What does rendering use? CPU? RAM? GPU?

 

[BAZMick]

More RAM and an SSD (Solid State Hard drive)

 

[Katekate]

look at whatever is bottlenecking when you render, and upgrade that.

also how long/complex are your sequences?

Are you using shaders?

What are the specs of your machine?


An SSD is always a worthwhile upgrade if you don't have one already, more ram if you are maxing it out.
on a laptop, there is usually nothing you can do to upgrade the CPU or video card.

For reference, I just opened one of my songs and rendered it and it took 10.725 seconds. so 10min is pretty out there, and must be some combination of slow machine and/or complicated sequence.

 

[Novalak]

Its a complecated sequence i guess and CPU is where its maxing, but its an i7 so i would have thought it could handle it - the graphocs card is low which i thought might offload to CPU maybe, thus the question

A 32GB, i7 Macbook Pro is replacing this old laptop in the coming weeks so hopefully its better

 

[Katekate]

xlights does most of its rendering with the CPU, it only uses the GPU for shaders.

 

[i13]

I haven't looked into this myself but have you tried render caching? https://manual.xlights.org/xlights/chapters/chapter-five-menus/file/settings#render-cache

Another thing that can help with render times is to reduce the frame rate of the sequences. My sequences are at 40 frames per second so I just tried rendering one. These are my render times:

• 40 frames per second: 54.500 seconds
• 20 frames per second: 27.517 seconds

If you decide to lower the frame rate, make a separate copy of your sequences first because you might not like the result. xLights saves the sequence when you change this setting.

 

[tooms]

Sometimes from the check sequence tool within xlights theirs hints in the log file on what can be causing excessive long render times, suggest also maybe grab one of the 'xlights around the world' sequences' and render it as is and see if it's acceptable and on par with what everyone else is getting.

Edit: Just rendered the vanilla XATW Greatest Showman sequence on my desktop, 35.447 seconds, I'm using a Ryzen 3700X with 32gb of DRAM, SSD storage. Xlights version 2020.57