Speed Up The Compositor - Blender Optimization Tip

This week we will be looking at a way to optimize your renders in Blender with settings within the compositor. I have had good results with these features, but myself only discovered them recently when researching for just such a feature, so I thought I'd share it and help those of you who aren't aware of them a little bit. So without further ado,

The Compositor Performance Tab

This feature appears to be largely overlooked, but can make a big difference when rendering out an animation with a complex compositing nodetree. I found that I could regularly save well over a second per frame with the options in this tab, which adds up over longer projects. 

The two main options I used were the Chunk size, which acts very similarly to the tile size option in the render settings (hey devs, could you add an option to sync them?) and is a major part of this optimization technique. You want to use very similar values as with the render tile size,  with 32x32 or 64x64 for most CPUs and 256x256 to 512x512 for most GPUs. Just try rendering the same frame a few times on each and get an average and see what is best for your setup.

 The other option is OpenCL which can help a lot if you have a decent GPU, as it splits the workload on certain nodes and lets the GPU bear the brunt of certain calculations.

Notice: The render quality changed practically nothing, staying within the margin of error of .1 seconds through all levels. Changing these settings will probably have a negligible effect on all but the most complicated nodetrees.