---
title: Performance
order: 2
---

The v3 renderer runs the heavy work on the GPU and splits drawing into two states. While you orbit, pan, or drag a gizmo, Chisel draws a synchronous navigation frame at reduced resolution for zero-lag feedback; once you stop, a full-quality frame settles on a background worker and lands when it's ready.

![the v3 Performance panel with Adaptive Quality and Dynamic Resolution](../assets/rendersettings-performance.webp)

## The GPU compute pipeline

Tile binning, per-tile primitive masks, interval pruning, and tape compaction all run as GPU compute passes — the CPU no longer touches per-tile work. Each chain carries its own occupancy grid so rays skip empty space (this replaces the old scene-wide grid), tiles are walked front-to-back, and the per-chain step budget is tiered by primitive count.

## The two-state render loop

Adaptive Quality drives a small state machine instead of spinning between frames:

- **Navigation** — the frame at your current pose, drawn synchronously at the adaptive (dynamically scaled) resolution and step budget. Zero lag.
- **Settling** — when the view has been still for a moment, one full-quality job is posted to a background Rust worker. It tiles and renders the whole image itself while the navigation frame stays on screen.
- **Settled** — the finished image lands and is reblitted from cache with no further GPU work.

Any motion — camera move, an edit, a modal property change — resets to navigation and cancels the in-flight settle. The status bar shows *Chisel: 0/1* while navigating or waiting on the worker, and *Chisel: 1/1* once the full-quality image is on screen.

## Adaptive Quality (while navigating)

- **Adaptive Quality** — default *on*. Master toggle for the navigation downscale. With it off there is no state machine: every frame renders at the full *Render Resolution*.
- **Navigation Steps** — `4–128`, default `48`. Max ray-march steps while moving (lower = smoother navigation).
- **Navigation Threshold** — `0.001–0.05`, default `0.0050`. Hit threshold while moving (higher = faster).
- **Adaptive Resolution** — `1–100%`, default `40%`. Resolution while interacting. When *Dynamic Resolution* is on this is the ceiling — the quality used when the GPU has headroom.

## Dynamic Resolution

Dynamic Resolution auto-adjusts the navigation resolution to hold a target framerate: it drops toward *Min Resolution* on heavy frames and rises back toward *Adaptive Resolution* when the GPU has headroom. The step count is trimmed alongside the resolution, so heavy chains stay smooth.

- **Dynamic Resolution** — default *on*. Off = fixed navigation resolution at *Adaptive Resolution*.
- **Target FPS** — `10–144`, default `60`. The navigation framerate the scaling aims to hold.
- **Min Resolution** — `1–100%`, default `15%`. The lowest resolution dynamic scaling will drop to.

## Clean-frame caching

Camera-only frames reuse their tiles, tapes, and materials — an edit invalidates just the touched object or material instead of the whole scene. The empty-scene clear frame is cached and reblitted rather than re-uploaded every tick.

## Per-chain limits

Each chain is capped at **256 primitives** and **512 instructions**. These limits are not surfaced in the UI or as a popup — over-limit primitives are silently dropped and the instruction list is truncated, with at most a console warning (the console is quiet by default in v3).

## See also

- [Quality](quality.md) — settings used for the settled, full-quality frame
- [F12 Render](f12-render.md) — the camera render forces full quality (no navigation pass)
- [Display → Proxy Mesh](display.md#proxy-mesh) — alternative viewport for EEVEE/Cycles