How to make Blender renders faster on Mac

Blender is hands down one of the most powerful free applications there is. I’m constantly amazed by the quality of 3D models all the talented people out there are able to create using software that’s 100% free and available on Windows, Mac and Linux. But as anyone who’s ever worked with 3D models knows, rendering 3D is insanely taxing on your computer. To a point where even the newest Apple Silicon Macs could easily take hours to render out a short 30-second animation.

Common ways to speed up Blender

There’s a lot of advice online regarding speeding up Blender, and most of it is focused on your scene settings. Things like adjusting the number of samples, changing your de-noising settings, lowering your frame rate or the resolution your scene. And while all these things do play a massive role in your render speed, any speed gains during rendering will almost always come with sacrificed image quality.

But there’s one setting you can change to drastically increase your render speed, without having to touch your scene settings at all.

Use your GPU and GPU only.

The video above walks you through all the steps, but the first thing you’ll want to do is to make sure you’re using “GPU Compute” in your Scene settings. You’re now doing all the heavy lifting using your GPU, right? Nope.

Open up your Preferences, and under the System settings, look at the Cycles render devices. If you’re like me and stupidly checked everything available here, thinking using both CPU and GPU for rendering will obviously make your renders faster, you’re wrong. What you want to do is to disable your CPU completely, and leave only your GPU selected. At least on Apple Silicon (M1, M2, M3) Macs. I’ve yet to test this on Intel Macs.

In the video above you’ll see the same scene with the same settings rendered twice. Once with both CPU and GPU, and then with GPU alone. Surprisingly, GPU alone completes the render almost 2x faster.

Using your GPU alone will also make your Mac run a lot cooler and more quiet. My M1 Max MacBook Pro would have its fans running like crazy when rendering anything with CPU enabled, and while it’s still warm when rendering with GPU, it’s noticeably faster and more quiet. Same goes for me M2 Mac Studio. It was never as loud as my laptop, but rendering with CPU definitely made the fans spin harder than any other task on that computer. Switched to GPU, and any Blender renders are now completely silent. And yeah, 2x faster.

Is this for Macs only?

I’ve heard the same thing works with similar results on Windows workstations, but since I don’t own one I can’t properly test it. But if you’re doing a lot of Blender work on Windows, it’s something to look into.

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