Add GPU Usage Throttling Option During Post-Render Denoising in Blender

Hi Blender Team and Community,

I’d like to suggest a performance management feature focused specifically on the denoising phase after rendering, which often gets overlooked in render optimization discussions.

Currently, Blender supports GPU-based denoising using OptiX or OpenImageDenoise, which is incredibly powerful in terms of quality and speed. However, post-render denoising on GPU often maxes out the GPU usage to 100%, even for still frames. This causes serious system lag, unresponsiveness, or hangs — especially on systems where the GPU also drives the display or is shared with other tasks.

While CPU-based denoising is an option, it’s not viable for all users (especially with older CPUs), and external denoising tools do not match the visual quality Blender provides natively.

💡 Proposed Feature: Add a user-accessible setting to limit GPU usage or throttle GPU resources specifically during post-render denoising.

This could include:

• A toggle or slider to cap GPU usage (e.g., 50–100%)

• Option to slow down GPU denoising to preserve responsiveness

• Running GPU denoising at a lower priority or using adaptive throttling

• An option to schedule denoising as a background task after rendering

🎯 Why This Matters: Users working on mid-range GPUs or shared GPU systems (e.g., laptops) often face complete system slowdowns or freezes during denoising.

It interrupts multi-tasking or prevents usage of other applications while Blender is in its denoising phase.

For animation workflows, this can become a bottleneck for frame-by-frame rendering and review.

✅ Benefits: • Prevents system hangs while preserving Blender's excellent denoising quality

• Gives users more control over the post-render process

• Makes Blender more accessible to users with limited hardware resources

• Encourages wider use of internal denoising features without offloading to lower-quality external tools

I hope this idea is considered for future releases or experimental builds. Blender already excels at giving users deep control — extending that to GPU usage during denoising would be a valuable addition.

Thank you for the incredible work on Blender!