2022-06-07 Render & Cycles Meeting

Meetings
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Attendees

  • Brecht Van Lommel (Blender)
  • Lukas Stockner (Blender)
  • Christophe Hery (Facebook)
  • Brian Savery (AMD)
  • Stefan Werner (Intel)
  • Sebastian Herholz (Intel)
  • Michael Jones (Apple)
  • Agnes Masanja (Unity)
  • David Ganter (Unity)
  • Alex Fuller

Notes

  • Blender 3.2 release is imminent, no more changes or fixed planned.
  • Intel OneAPI status: work is ongoing to get build and other issues sorted out.
  • Apple Metal: Michael will continue work on SVM optimizations. Also there will likely be a patch to tune parameters for specific GPUs.
  • AMD HIP:
    • Linux RDNA1 bug with certain texture resolutions is still there, we will release Blender 3.2 as is with a note in the release notes, waiting for a driver bug fix.
    • For Vega, a new Windows HIP SDK version is being tested that may get this working on Windows.
  • Brecht started looking into how to use the geometry nodes fields for new texture nodes on the CPU.
  • Lukas will post a design doc for Principled BSDF changes, and worked on various refactoring required for the implementations. He also looked into potential improvements to the sampling pattern, as well as blue noise dithering, though it’s unclear if the latter can be made to work well with adaptive sampling. He also looking into speeding up normal map tangent space computation by multithreading.
  • Christophe is looking into adding better IOR support for random walk subsurface scattering, to actually take into account the IOR for rays going into the surface from the viewer.
  • Sebastian plans to post a development branch with path guiding support in the coming weeks. Also still needs to meet with Christophe and Olivier to discuss integration with MNEE.
  • Alex reports that Cycles is being integrated into Gaffer, as an alternative to Appleseed.

Practical Info

This is a weekly video chat meeting for planning and discussion of Blender rendering development. Any contributor (developer, UI/UX designer, writer, …) working on rendering in Blender is welcome to join and add proposed items to the agenda.

For users and other interested parties, we ask to read the meeting notes instead so that the meeting can remain focused.

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Does the OneApi integration also target the Intel’s GPU support with Cycles? What kind of performance can the users expect from the Intel OneApi support?

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The OneAPI integration for Cycles is targeting Intel ARC GPUs. However in it’s current form, it can be run on some of the integrated GPUs found on some Intel CPUs (This may be removed in the future).

Although OneAPI can be extended to support GPUs from other manufacturers, the initial implementation is targeting ONLY Intel GPUs.

As for what sort of performance you can expect, I can not answer that question. However, there is a video from Intel showing off the OneAPI Cycles rendering backend running on a “undisclosed pre-production desktop GPU” that you can check here: Intel Arc Graphics | Rendering Cycles in Blender | Intel Graphics - YouTube

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