I have pretty complicated (for my PC) scene. When I try to render it in EEVEE, rendering window popping up and nothing happens, it just shows default grey grid background. I tried it with different settings (even without any effects and 16 samples) but it changed nothing. It doesn’t seem freeze or something (but if you try to do something in that window it will immediately freeze), I’ve literally left it for 1,5 hours and nothing happened.
But in the viewport everything works just fine. With all effects (even volumetrics) my pc can handle it in viewport, but not in actual render.
There’s no any modifiers in scene, so it’s not view/render difference
I have latest 2.8 version, which I downloaded yesterday
Why can it happening?
Hi, I also had this problem earlier on today. I had trouble rendering in Cycles, so I tried Eevee and it did nothing for a couple of minutes. I didn’t really bother because after that I got Cycles to work and didn’t need Eevee anymore. I’ll try again to see if Eevee works if I give it more time, I’ll keep you updated 
I’m kinda forced to use eevee because I want to create animation
But if eevee really takes as much time as cycles, it will be pointless to use it
Update: I gave it a little more time and it seems to be working fine with me…
Ok, I tried to render it in Cycles and it worked just fine. Frame fully rendered in 30 mins, then I switched back to eevee and it got stuck on render window again.
Seems like some sort of bug, BUT I’ve also tried to render only few objects in EEVEE and surprise, it rendered in a few seconds, so eevee is working. Somehow eevee can’t handle complex scenes, but on the other hand cycles can do it pretty easily on the same pc
So, EEVEE is heavier than Cycles? It even sounds wrong
EEVEE uses only the GPU, could it be that you’re running out of VRAM? I think that EEVEE handles this by loading objects bit-by-bit into memory and removing them from memory when they’re done. But I’m not sure about that! Either way, the amount of VRAM you have will be the biggest bottleneck on performance in EEVEE. What resolution are you rendering at? That has a major impact on RAM usage.
My advice is to go through your scene, organize it carefully, and test each collection for performance with an F12 render at a low resolution. Write down render times for each part, along with RAM usage, so you can compare later on.
Once you’ve tested your performance, you’ll probably notice some materials or objects are taking more time than others, or failing outright. This can happen because EEVEE has been updating, so it is probably not your fault! EEVEE performs best with the Principled shader, so use that as often as possible. Reuse node-groups if you can, so they only have to compile once (at least this helps in Cycles, not sure about EEVEE). Bake procedural textures and the result of MixRGB nodes/ color ramps for textures that aren’t being used in multiple materials. Also try tweaking EEVEE settings one-by-one as you test render your scene, such as shadow-resolution, Screen Space Reflections, etc. Also, try and think back to when the error occured. Load your old file from the last time it worked.
One time, I had a problem of volumetrics causing EEVEE to behave oddly when the update that removed the volumetric check-box was commited. I had to make a new scene and re-link the collections (because it was the Scene that contained corrupt data).
1 Like
Eevee can behave this way when you don’t have enough VRAM but it’s not bad enough to straight-out crash the render. In this case it can take hours per frame instead of seconds because it’s constantly having to move things in and out of VRAM.
What does the GPU and CPU utilization look like in the Task Manager (if this is Windows)? That should show you if it’s working, and also give an indication of whether all (or more than all) of the video card memory is allocated.
It’s possible that some of this is bugs, because as you saw, Eevee renders OK in the viewport, and Cycles can often render the scene with very little memory when Eevee wants to allocate many GB for the same thing. I believe there are some simplifications that Eevee does during viewport display that are done differently in a final render which may explain this.
You may be able to turn down Eevee settings to get it to fit within the hardware that you have available, so you might try experimenting here. Set the number of Eevee Render Samples to something really small when testing (like 1).
If you have a scene you can share which demonstrates the problem you can always report a bug and include the scene so the devs can take a look at why the final render is so much worse.
1 Like
This just sounds like it’s some kind of setting, to me. You certainly should check, using some kind of system monitor, whether the Blender process is consuming “100% CPU.”
And – it could simply be some kind of bug in this brand-new technology. You should keep a copy of the blend-file which demonstrates the problem, and maybe open a trouble-ticket. Be sure that you’ve downloaded and are using the most recent version of Blender 2.8. (If the file is small enough, you could also attach it here.)
1 Like
I tried to render it today and it stuck again. Checked task manager and it showed me that blender uses only 26% of CPU, plus I could browse task manager and do simple things without any lag. Unfortunately I couldn’t find any information about GPU usage
Is it normal?