Davinci Resolve 17 free beta rendering terribly slowly

Hi, I'm fairly new to this forum. But I have been using Davinci Resolve for a couple of years now, since version 15 I believe. My most recent problem is that when I go to render the final cut of my video the rendering process is significantly slower than it used to be. The video I am trying to create is for YouTube and is about an hour long with appropriate cuts and text blocks, it took about 4 hours to render. I'm not sure if there is a rendering setting I may have changed but I don't think I have done anything different compared to how I usually do. I have tested and determined that it is just rendering slowly all of a sudden, I tried rendering a different video with the same effect. I even rendered a 48 second clip that took almost 2 minutes to render even though it was just a black screen with music under. It seems to consistently only render at about 2 microseconds per second throughout the entire process. My hard drives used to be a little stuffed full and I thought that may have been it, but after I cleared out some things to make more room in the drives to no avail or change. So I'm fairly certain it isn't a power of my pc problem. That said here are my pc components.
Motherboard: MSI X570 A-Pro
CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600 6-core OC'd to 4.00 Ghz
CPU Cooler: Corsair H80i v2
Graphics Card: Asus Geforce GTX 970 Strix
RAM: Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 2x 8 GB Sticks at 3000 MHz
Power Supply: Corsair CX 600 Watt
Other Misc.: 3 1 TB HDDs , 1 500 GB SSD, 1 Disc Tray Drive

If anyone could help me figure this out it would be awesome.

Free or Studio?

Native or nVidia encoder?

I am using the free version, I believe the encoder is the H.264 encoder

I feel your pain. The difference in rendering speed between free and Studio version is astounding. At least it has been on my machine with Nvidia 2080ti. The same timeline which rendered in free version at about 8-11fps flies in Sudio at 60 to 80fps. Some simple edits render at 120fps. So, I am affraid there is no such thing as a free lunch. YMMV based on hardware and delivery settings but in my case the difference has been HUGE!

Make sure the GPU and Memory setting in Preferences is set to CUDA, not OpenCL.

Gary Hango, thanks so much that was it! Render times got cut down to the usual 30-40 minutes