I did a quick test with the new shadow catcher. The results seem pretty good I guess.
I made a custom 32bit HDRI and used photogrammetry to create the shadow catcher’s geometry and create some camera positions.
I could do other “VFX” tests if you guys have any suggestions on how to test the new shadow catcher.
Also, this is the Metalic version:
Getting lackluster motion blur with Optix and 29 Jun CyclesX version on Windows RTX 3070. While CPU renders the whole motion blur “volume” of a spinning propeller, Optix only renders like 30% of the blades positions in the timeframe with holes inbetween. CPU:
Optix:
Tested the latest build (cf028a8f6806):
Additional notes: OptiX denoiser now works in the viewport even with adaptive sampling enabling, while OIDN still produces overexposed image if ‘AS’ enabled. I’ve noticed some abnormal behavior (glitch): When I use CUDA/OptiX with both GPU/CPU enabled, Cycles X uses only CPU as the primary device. In order to use GPU, I had to disable CPU in the Blender’s system settings.
I have just tested the latest Cycles-X version. This now includes the possibility to render with GPU + CPU simultaneously. Many thanks for this first.
Unfortunately, this slows down rendering for me, since the split is 50/50. Since my CPU is much weaker than my GPU, this is currently having a detrimental effect on me. I hope that the developers will soon find a solution to find a split in rendering that is better suited to the performance of the devices.
I am already looking forward to further improvements. Please keep it up!
I’ve been out of the loop for a while (vacation 
).
I’ve seen there’s some volume rendering work already. What else is “restored”?
Are Bevel and Ao nodes fully back in CyclesX?
Just wondering if adaptive sampling has been disabled?
This should work fine, since most of the surfaces are rough.
The problem comes with reflective surfaces, like a marble floor for example, you can try some of this 
I’m sorry if this was already asked, but I tried some renders with Cycles X… and while it’s incredible faster, specially on heavy scenes, on my end, it produces a lot more noise with the same settings, specially on the grass.
I’ve even tried the following settings:
*Increasing indirect clamp, and glossy filter, with no improvements. *
On both renders, caustics are disabled.
Here is a comparasion:
Cycles X render:
Cycles render:
Any thoughts? Thanks!
As I know it is not working if you combine it with a denoiser. I’ll checked it 2 days ago
Are you using subsurface scattering on the grass/leaves? If so, is your original scene set to Random Walk in the shader? The older, original, Burley SSS is not supported currently so this might be a reason for the difference.
After further inspection, I found the problem.
For some reason, the spot light I’m using on the scene is creating heavy noise/fireflies on Cycles X. The only way of avoinding this is increasing the size of the light, however it creates another problem of changing the look and specially the shadows.
To be honest I had a lot of cases in the past where vanilla Cycles rendered slower or at equal speed with CPU+GPU vs only GPU. I’m using only GPU or CPU (on some GPU less machines on the render farm (3dsmax with VRay/Corona is the main/old purpose of the farm) now.
Gpu + Cpu works much better since 2.9 i think.
Thank you Mr.
(i actually downloaded, tried myself, and felt guilty for asking 
)
Hi, I noticed this issue when rendering the volume on a separate view layer / pass.
Basically where the volume intersects the surface we see the edge/shadowing of the indirect lighting clipped quite outside of the volume, so not quite correctly/fully rendered.
For comparison purposes I’m showing 4 images, the background view layer (with the volume only as indirect), the foreground layer with the volume+alpha, a composite of these 2 view layers (where we clearly see the issue) and a 4th image with everything rendered together where we dont see any issues on the edge of the volume.
Background view layer with indirect contribution of volume.
Foreground view layer with volume + alpha
Composite
Full render (without separate view layers)
PS:
Regarding render times comparison, using cycles-x branch took 17 minutes on my machine vs 25 minutes on the master branch, so this is a great improvement!!! Well done guys
Work is being done to improve the performance of rendering when combining multiple devices.
https://developer.blender.org/D11774
Note: Please keep in mind that Cycles-X is still in the early stages of development. Generally speaking when a feature is first re-introduced into Cycles-X, it will not be optimized for the best performance. Instead it’s a first steps to get a feature implemented and then it’s optimized or expanded on later.
The good news first. I was able to test the new balancer this morning. Now that I can combine GPU with my CPU for rendering, I get a 20% speed increase.
What doesn’t work at all yet: The combination of adaptive sampling with OIDN. As soon as OIDN is switched on, the adaptive sampling does not work at all anymore.
So with the latest cycles x build i’m getting a totally overexposed render result when using oidn. Anyone else too?
" overexposed render result" => I got this with an old Cycles X Version. With “blender-3.0.0-alpha+cycles-x.7df40050f94e-windows.amd64-release” the problem is gone for me
