How to use Blender with a Dual or Quad Core PC

This is a quick tip for those using Blender with a multi-core PC. Want to speed up render times exponentially? Blender doesn’t have a build for these types of computers, instead, there’s a well-disguised feature called threads.

How to Use Threads

The Threads Button

  1. Go to the Scene Window(F10).
  2. Set “Threads” to match the number of cores you want to use.

That’s it! Blender is now optimized for your PC. Render times should be noticeably shorter.

Comments

Hi,

About rendering with multiple threads, how to set those options when doing command-line rendering?

Thanks,
Che

I haven't done command line rendering myself, but I would look at this page: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/Rendering_From_Command_Line
For four threads you probably have to add -t 4 to the command.

Gracias por el dato lo acabo de usar y los render son mas rapidos

everyone knows that blender sux. Microsoft Word is better!

errr....blender be 3d graphics,,,,,word be glorified pen'n'paper

Blender 2.47 does this automatically.

Speeding up render time is useful. But what I really need is a way to speed up modeling in the 3D viewport. Is there any way to do this?

I just got a quad-core iMac but suspect Blender is not making use of the hardware. I'll open Activity Monitor when I get home today to verify this...

Modeling speed is largely dependent on your graphics card and memory. The processor does not have much to do with that. What are your specs for memory and graphics card?

Does it just hang a lot while rotating view and zooming in and out, or does it get slow extruding, grabbing, scaling? Or is it just slow when doing some functions, such as spin duplicate?

I have a Macbook with 3G of RAM and a Nvidia 9400M graphics card, and the only times I ever get trouble with modeling is if I'm working with 200,000+ vertices in edit mode, and only is I'm changing my view. I can have a model with 400k+ vertices in object mode, and be editing a smaller mesh, and it runs just fine.

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