
One trick that others use here on the forums (I'm not an animator) is to render a single frame of your animation. Basically what I'm saying is go with whatever resolution you feel like you need. Likewise, if you go to 3840x2160, that's 4 times as many pixels, but the render won't take 4 times as long. If you cut your image size in half (960x540) even though the number of pixels is cut down to 1/4th of what it was, your render time won't reduce to 1/4th because of all that other stuff that's going on. So changing the image size won't have a huge impact on render time. Then, once the render starts, a lot of the processing power is spent on calculating light, reflections, transparency, etc, and then finally, rendering the image. For an average render, Iray spends part of the time just loading textures and geometry into the GPU.
