by Olivier Crespo Barrio·Rendering
Images © Olivier Crespo Barrio. Used for product review; image policy.
Split Render Tool 4 earns its place in the superhive library as a complete rewrite of Split Render Tool, rebuilt to render tiles faster and with fewer resources.
Split Render Tool 4 tackles GPU memory limits by rendering a frame as separate tiles and merging them without user interaction. Because it renders in tiles, the data VRAM creates during rendering drops, so you can render at higher resolutions, up to 400% of your current resolution, on the same hardware. It does not reduce the VRAM data your scene sends.
The add-on supports Blender 4.1 and above, single frames and animations, both Cycles and Eevee, and OSX and Windows; Blender versions below 4.1 and Linux have not been tested. It offers three modes: Split Render splits the screen into tiles and merges them in the Compositor Editor into a new Blender file with a group node per View Layer; Animated Border Render creates Border Region keyframes along the timeline; and Object Border Render renders the on-screen region of selected objects by analyzing their location and scale each frame.
Splitting a render breaks Blender's AI Denoising, leaving mismatched pixels at tile borders. SRT4 fixes this without user interaction using three methods, Denoise Node, Render Borders, and Denoise Borders, with adjustable border size and blur. It is a complete rewrite of Split Render Tool, faster and using fewer resources.
Split Render Tool 4 is best for blender artists hitting "System is out of GPU memory" errors or needing to render at higher resolutions than their hardware normally allows, across single frames and animations in Cycles or Eevee.
Split Render Tool 4 is completely free to download and use.
Split Render Tool 4 supports Blender 4.1 and above, running on both OSX and Windows. It works with the Cycles and Eevee render engines and handles single frames as well as animations. Blender versions below 4.1 and Linux have not been tested, so behaviour there is unknown. On a supported version and platform, you can use its split-tile rendering together with the Animated Border Render and Object Border Render modes to work around GPU memory limits.
Split Render Tool 4 does not reduce the VRAM data your scene sends to the card; whatever you send to VRAM stays the same. Because it renders the image in separate tiles, it drastically reduces the amount of data VRAM creates during rendering, which is what lets you produce a full image at higher resolutions on the same hardware, up to 400% of your current resolution. In one comparison, Blender's maximum was 850 × 474 while SRT reached 3840 × 2160.
Split Render Tool 4 fixes the border mismatches that AI denoising causes when an image is split, and it does so without user interaction using three methods. Denoise Node uses denoising passes and a Denoise node and is the recommended option. Render Borders renders extra images to fix the splits, an older approach that is slower and needs more disk space. Denoise Borders combines both, avoids rendering extra images, and suits projects that need Blender's AI denoising. You can set the border size and blur amount.
Split Render Tool 4 is listed as free in this catalog, so you can add it to Blender without a purchase. Licensing terms can change over time, so check the developer's page for the current details before you rely on it. On the functional side, you get the Split Render, Animated Border Render, and Object Border Render modes, support for Cycles and Eevee, and documentation to help you get started.
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