What Can I Do If Cinerender in Archicad Is Unusually Slow?

Reading time: 5 min.

Cinerender is the CPU render engine built into Archicad that lets you generate high-quality renders directly from the BIM environment. However, it can sometimes show unusual slowness that affects productivity. This article is designed to help you identify when this slowness is genuinely a technical problem and what steps you can take to resolve it.

Before you start: is this really a Cinerender problem?

Before applying any specific solution, it's essential to make sure the slowness isn't caused by other factors external to the render engine. We recommend following this checklist:

• Check your computer's overall performance: Make sure no background processes are consuming excessive resources (such as antivirus software, cloud syncing, system updates, etc.).
• Review the Archicad model: Heavy models, with complex geometry or high-resolution textures, can slow down rendering. Try testing with a simpler model.
• Nested or faulty models: Some models may contain imported or linked elements with modelling errors or degenerate bodies. These errors can cause excessive slowness during rendering, even if the rest of the model appears to be in good shape.
• Up-to-date software: Make sure Archicad, your operating system, graphics card drivers and other related software are fully up to date. Older versions can cause incompatibilities or performance issues.
• Excessive use of light sources: A high number of lights in the scene can significantly increase render time, since the engine has to calculate multiple lighting interactions. Simplifying the scene by reducing the number of lights or grouping them strategically can improve performance without compromising visual quality too much.
• Is this something new?: If Cinerender has worked correctly in the past and is now showing slowness with no significant changes to the model or the computer, then yes, this could be unusual behaviour.

Only if you're still experiencing abnormal slowness after this review should you continue with the following steps.

Steps to resolve the problem

1. Have the Archicad installers and their updates available. If you don't have them available: (Downloads – Graphisoft Spain).
2. Save any open projects and close the program.
3. Go to the folder where Archicad was installed, open the Cineware subfolder and delete the Plugins folder.
4. Start Archicad again and do a test render to check whether performance has improved.

If you're still experiencing slowness issues with Cinerender, contact us through our official channel at https://my.simbim.es and our technical team will assist you.