Renderzeit

Renderzeit (render time) is the time required to produce a rendered image or frame from a 3D scene. In German usage, the term is often used in discussions of computer graphics performance. Renderzeit encompasses the duration of all computations needed to transform scene data into final pixel values, including shading, lighting, texturing, and anti-aliasing, but excluding non-rendering steps such as model creation or animation editing. It is typically measured per frame for animation work or per image for standalone renders, and is expressed in milliseconds or seconds.

Factors influencing Renderzeit include scene complexity (polygon count, instancing, geometry detail), texture resolutions and compression, lighting setup (number of light sources, global illumination, ray depth), rendering method (rasterization, ray tracing, path tracing, hybrid approaches), sampling settings, denoising, motion blur, depth of field, resolution, and color bit depth. Software and hardware also matter: render engine and its optimizations, CPU vs GPU rendering, VRAM, memory bandwidth, CPU/GPU clock, and I/O bandwidth. Networked render farms and caching strategies can further affect overall render time in production environments.

Measuring and optimizing Renderzeit involves profiling tools and benchmarking. Typical metrics are frame time and per-sample rendering time. To reduce renderzeit, artists employ techniques such as reducing geometry, using level of detail, baking lighting and shadows, using proxies or instancing, lowering texture sizes, enabling adaptive sampling and denoising, and balancing resolution with desired quality. When necessary, distributed rendering across multiple machines or GPUs can significantly decrease wall-clock time, while careful scene organization helps identify bottlenecks.