Optimizing Render Settings & Performance

Render Mode

Element uses all the tricks in the book for rendering and optimizing, but when scene complexity increases, there are some important things to know.

Full Render

All user defined setting are kept at what they are set to and at final quality

Preview

Turns off some of the more intensive render settings so it is at a more comfortable temporary working performance speed. Turns off Super Sampling.

Draft

Turns off many features for fast temporary previews for animating.

Compress Textures

If you have noticeable banding in textures, you can uncheck this to use full quality textures at the cost of increased GPU memory usage. Having this checked will reduce the quality of your textures for speed while you are working. Turning this off will then load your textures at full quality. Compress Textures is on by default.

Multisampling

Reduces jagged edges on objects that have sharp highlights or reflections.

Supersampling

This is an additional method for reducing jagged edges. This will render your frame "super" large and re-sample it down to frame size. This allows for more detail to be saved and smoothed properly from the extra data.

Subsample Post Effects

If subsampling is enabled, glow and depth of field (pixel blur) are rendered for every motion blur sample that is calculated. if the subsampling is off, the effects will be applied to the final image with motion blur.

Speed And Resources

Update GPU Drivers

Check for updated drivers before using Element, there are many stability and performance changes in these GPU drivers from Nvidia you don’t want to be without!

CPU rendering vs GPU rendering

On the CPU a more complicated scene will just take longer to render, but on the GPU, if the scene or memory requirements are too high, the GPU will crash so it is important to manage your GPU’s resources by closing unnecessary GPU programs and watching texture memory usage. A graphics card with 2GBs of VRAM will allow you to create more complex scenes compared to a card with only 512MBs.

GPU Resources

Many programs such as Photoshop and 3D games use GPU resources so it is a good idea to close unnecessary programs to get the most out of Element.

Memory Management

Image textures will fill up your graphics card memory fast if you are not careful. Using fewer texture maps and lower resolution files will help keep memory available for rendering.

Motion Blur & Depth of Field

Multi-Pass depth of field can be slow to render in complex scenes. Using motion blur with depth of field will make the scene 8 times slower to render. When working you may want to toggle Depth of Field off until final rendering to keep the responsiveness of the Plug-in.

Closing or limiting GPU based FX

Since computers and software often take advantage of the GPU you may want to limit unnecessary usage to improve your Element performance. So try to close programs like Photoshop when not using them to preserve memory consumption. The Element UI shows the memory used and memory available on the GPU but this is not the memory Element is using but the total memory the card is using altogether.

Lower Multi-Sampling

The multi-sampling mode can improve memory performance on older or less powered cards by using less memory to render. If you are using extremely large comps it may be the only way to render them on the GPU due to memory limitations.

Restart is always a good Idea

If your GPU is overloaded or you want to freshen it up, just restart the computer. It can help!