Yeah that's pretty much it. It all depends on how much resources your VSTi's are consuming though. For instance, a very simple VSTi that uses a small amount of CPU and no disk, wouldn't be worth rendering at all (in my opinion). However, if you have a VSTi that uses a lot of resources, then yeah... might be worth it if your computer is choking. Typical cases that I run across would be huge multi-layered sample based VSTi's with built in FX... or certain types of synths (damn those supersaws).
You'll need to pull up your performance monitor while your project is playing, in order to get a better feel for which VSTi's might be worth rendering.
Also note that you don't need to render - you can use a function in Reaper called "Freeze", which basically does the same thing but is slightly less clumsy than rendering a track, muting it, and bringing in the render as a new track.
Also I believe "Reamote" allows you to utilize a different PC on your network to offload some of your processing load. I myself have an old shitty PC with a $20 cpu and 4gb of ram, and I rarely have to worry about freezing my tracks.
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