I can't find the Save Buffers checkbox in Blender

Question

I am trying to show the tiles as they are being rendered and another forum post said to uncheck the Save Buffers checkbox but I cannot find the checkbox

Answer 1

The Save Buffers checkbox is only available in Blender 2.9X in the Cycles render engine settings under Render Properties > Performance > Final Render. It is not available in Blender 3.0+ and onwards.

Also see bug report https://developer.blender.org/T87895

Answer 2

Do you need the Save Buffers function or do you just want to see the tiles while rendering?

In older Cycles versions you had the tiles showing because rendering performance was better with smaller tiles like 16x16, 32x32 or 64x64 for CPU rendering and larger tiles like 128x128 or 256x256 for GPU rendering.

The recent Cycles X development got rid of this and usually renders the full frame at once. However, and this is why people sometimes wonder if there is something wrong when trying to render in 4k, under the Performance > Memory settings there is an option called Use Tiling, it's enabled by default and set to a Tile Size of 2048 pixels.

That's why in a standard format like 1920x1080 Blender renders full frames, but as soon as one of the image dimensions goes past 2048 pixels you will have tiling again (if you leave the option enabled).

So if your goal is just to see tiles while rendering, you can simply leave the option enabled and set a smaller tile size like 128 or 64 pixels. Presumably this will slow down the render, but who knows? Depending on your hardware there might be a setting that's better for your performance than the default.