I am using Blender 2.91 with Windows 10. I am using the Cycles Rendering Engine on my GPU which is an RTX 2070.
I have a project that I'm working on that takes an incredibly long time to render. I am doing all of the obvious things to reduce render times (ex. lowing the sample rate, decreasing the number of light bounces, changing the tile size to 512px because I am using an RTX 2070 card, turning off reflective and refractive caustics, checking "render region," turning down the number of max subdivisions, etc...). Even with all of these time saving efforts, I can't get a frame to render in less than about 8 minutes which is way too long considering that I might need to render a 1000+ frame animation in this scene.
I noticed that the lengthiest process for rendering seems to be called "synchronizing object." There are a lot of objects in this scene with many different somewhat hi resolution textures. Is there a way to simply bake every object together to cut down on rendering time? Even if that's not possible is there any way to quickly sum all of the objects together of print them as a single mesh object or something to make rendering this scene less computationally expensive?
Also, Idk if this is relevant or not but my memory is peaking at over 21GB which seems crazy on account of my video card is only 8GB and my computer only has 16GB of RAM total.
Update
I deleted about half of the materials and render time is FANTASTICALLY short! It still looks great even with only half of the materials present. The only problem now is that I can't add additional textures. I am trying to change the color and material of the main door to a wood material but the door material won't change at all. It just keeps the material of the wall for some reason. Any thoughts on why this is happening? I've included the Blender file and and a screenshot.
Here is the Blender File.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ik7SoVbX7c1LiEyj1An1GKJiyRTOnoCk/view?usp=sharing