Pause viewport rendering while Render command is running
This probably applies to all render engines, but for the purposes of explanation:
Imagine you have set viewport to preview with Cycles GPU. Perhaps with a high sample number. Or perhaps you have an animation with many frames.
You now run a Render command from the Render menu. The primary render window takes over, and works on the render.
But your viewport is still chugging along in the background, trying to render samples. It steals GPU cycles and slows down the primary Render command.
If you have an animation, the viewport will keep stealing GPU samples every time the primary Render window advances to the next frame. Each time the Render window moves on to the next frame, the viewport steals samples from the GPU's capacity by updating in the background.
I'm suggesting an automatic pause of the viewport render, while a render command is running.
3 Comments
Close the view window.
Sure, or easier, just switch it to solid render or something less costly.
But this is not intuitive, and probably costs a lot of people a lot of render time overall. I think a default behavior to pause viewport renders during a real render would help people out. And if there's reason to have both going, then make it optional and power users can turn it off.
Yes, it should pause automatically. Every extra click just wastes time. If you still need to interact with the viewport — which I assume happens less frequently — you could always re-enable viewport rendering manually. Switching to a different render mode isn’t ideal, especially with heavy scenes, since they often don’t respond well to those changes. That might be a personal quirk, but I’ve had issues with it.