Documentation:Windows Section 7

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Speed Considerations

The following tips can help you increase the speed at which your images render. Most of the time, the increase will be marginal, but in a very long render (some users have renders that take several days) even a small increase can save a noticable amount of time.

Render Priority

Raising the render priority may speed up your render, at the cost of reducing system response times and slower execution of other programs.

See Render Priority in the Render Menu for information on how to do this.

Some users have expressed surprise that changing the render priority does not seem to have a major effect on rendering times. This will of course be the case if the computer in question is not doing anything else at the time. The time when render priority starts to matter is when you are running another CPU-intensive process on the computer, one that would compete with POV-Ray for the CPU. It is then that changing this setting will make a noticable difference.

Render Window

Closing the render window will also speed up things. If your render is writing a lot of text to the message window, either hiding it (select an editor window for example), or better still, minimizing POV-Ray for Windows, will help somewhat. Note that the effect that these actions have is generally directly related to the time it takes to render the file, and the resolution of the render. They have less effect on long renders, and more effect on very fast renders.

Memory

In general, the more memory you have (up to a point) the faster things will run, although this is not a direct effect. (The less time Windows spends swapping things out to disk, the more time is available for your render)

Scene Features

Anti-aliasing, fog, media, area lights, photons, isosurface--all of these will cause your scene to require more time for completion. See the POV-Ray documentation for more details.

Render Quality

Consider using a lower quality setting if you're just testing your scene, and do not care about the quality of the output.

Bug Reports

Table of Contents

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