Well, there may be faster machines than mine. But a xeon 8core, 6G RAM and a nvidia GTX 650 in ubuntu is not the poorest thing on earth…
Nevertheless, when starting a render process with eevee, the machine gets 99,5% unresponsive. Even moving the mouse takes several minutes.
Now, I’m generally launching blender with nice 19 (using nice -19 env BAMF_DESKTOP_FILE_HINT=/var/lib/snapd/desktop/applications/blender_blender.desktop /snap/bin/blender %U in alacarte as launching command), and gnome control centre reports it with lowest priority.
This smells a littlebit like a bug - or are there good ideas around what I still could do?
My Solution: At 6G of RAM, the machine fell completely unusable
At 8G, it was much better, but still laggy
at 12G: no problems at all
So upgrade your RAM, if you can
Highly likely your GPU is a bit overwhelmed by the task. Eevee and the Blender GUI both rely on OpenGL. Might be that a 650 isn’t a good fit for the task.
You can try it with command line rendering that would release the burden of rendering the GUI. Just don’t expect wonders.
Seeing more or less the same issue with a 1050ti, system’s UI (X11 on Linux) gets very laggy whenever a Eevee render job is active. Like @chalybeum hinted my impression was that kind of lower end GPU just wasn’t enough for Eevee to run well, however it surprised me that it did work okay in the viewport (while it notably struggled with Blender’s UI at the same time … very slow compared to 2.79).
Didn’t bother to compare with my other machine (which has a 1080) though, because Cycles provides better results in similar render times anyway, without bogging down everything else to a crawl.
For unknown reason it’s a little better now. Maybe for the reason that I have 8G of RAM now; RAM is eaten up nearly completely. I’ll get another 4G next few days, let’s see.
Now, at 12G of RAM, everything is fine. Machine is completely usable when rendering, not lags at all.
6G - unusable
8G - limited usability when rendering
12G - no probs at all
So upgrading may be the most easy way to solve that - as far as you have enough banks in your machine.