How to render faster in Cycles with Blender 2.8?

Steps to speed up render times in Cycles

Selecting GPU or CPU rendering in Blender 2.8:
If you have a supported GPU, change this in the Render panel under the Device section. If no GPU is detected the this field will grey out.

GPU renders a lot faster than CPU. Blender 2.8 supports most Nvidia cards because it was built to run with CUDA cores. The latest Nvidia RTX cards are also supported however at this time the benefits of RTX for quicker raytracing render speed is not supported. I believe this is currently in development to be implemented in future Blender updates, possibly in 2.9 or later.

For the artist using newer iMacs, the AMD Radeon card is not supported. From what I understand, Apple has dropped the ball on providing future support for Open CL on MacOS. Hence the decision for the Blender development team to utilise the resource in other areas of the software. In light of the situation, AMD is funding to have a developer implement Open CL into Blender and is currently in the works.

In the Feature Set, if you see Experimental (with a warning sign) this means Blender will use both the GPU and CPU to render your scene. This is an experiment and can crash your machine. As always save your file before testing to see if you get quicker render results.

Setting up tiles for GPU Rendering:
In the Render panel, open the Performance tab. Go to the Tile section and set the X and Y to a higher number like 256.
With GPU rendering, higher tile number renders quicker. My theory is that, the larger the Ram on your GPU the more memory it can store hence you can increase the tile for better efficiency.

Setting up tiles for CPU Rendering:
In the Render panel, open the Performance tab. Go to the Tile section and set the X and Y to a lower number like 64.

With CPU rendering, lower tile number renders quicker.

Adjust Render Samples:
Balance your render samples. This is dependent on the quality and size of your rending. The higher the number the better quality but the longer it will take. In most of my rendering situation I set the render numbers to 256 or 512.

Change colour management setting to speed up rendering:

1 In the World panel, set View Transform to Raw.

2. Render your single frame scene by pressing F12.

3. Once the image has completed rendering. Go to the World panel and set View Transform back to Filmic.

When rendering as Raw there is no quality loss when you change back to Filmic. What this does is reduce the calculation for Filmic conversion process while it renders, but applies the transform at the very end when you manually switch from Raw to Filmic. Hence the process is done in one go when your scene has completed rendering. This will cut a shave seconds or even minutes from your render time.

Optimise Light Paths settings:
In the Render panel, under Light Paths adjust your Max Bounces to a lower value. If you do not have reflective materials like glass you can lower your Transparency and Transmission, Indirect Light and also switch off Reflective Caustics and Refractive Caustics.
This process reduces the strain on your computer power on un-necessary light bounces which might not be noticeable from the final render scene.

Version: Blender 2.8 Beta (June 2019)
Type of application: 3D Software
Related Sections: General / Rendering

Blender is an open source software for 3D creation. It offers modeling, texturing, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and video editing used for animation, film, video games and more. The latest Blender edition, 2.8 is undergoing major development and is showing vast improvements from the previous 2.79 version. Click here to download the latest Blender 2.8 update.