RTX GPU Support

I guess Optix will never be integrated into blender as it is under proprietary licence. However, if you are interested in hardware raytracing acceleration, it could be achieved with Vulkan.

it is compatible with gpl, read above

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Check here: https://twitter.com/tonroosendaal/status/1064565873913020417?lang=en

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afaik ecycles denoiser is the intel one, and iirc the patch included in those build is by @StefanW

ops my bad! you probably meant Optix raytracing?

related

There’s a nice presentation from GTC of developments in the Redshift commercial renderer here (including the announcement of Blender support coming soon!):

https://on-demand.gputechconf.com/gtc/2019/video/_/S9766/?fbclid=IwAR1DFgDjuCUdvwq9DdFwUGYAo--urxE9hvQikDkSps7Kw9U-0BvvpBVnGMk

Worth noting is the discussion of how they integrated RTX Optix support for ray tracing and their performance results in the forthcoming 3.0 version.

They only use Optix for RTX hardware as they found their own solution was faster so on older hardware they continue to use their own ray tracing CUDA implementation.
They got speedups of something like 5x for the actual ray tracing operations on RTX hardware with Optix, resulting in ~24% overall benchmark improvements.
They only use Optix for BVH and ray tracing. All the evaluation that takes place after a ray hit is done in their own CUDA code. Optix didn’t support everything they needed and their own stuff is already super-optimized. As a result they were able to implement the Oprix RTX support in a thin layer. This feels like it might be a good strategy for Cycles as well.

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Hi Blender Devs ,

i hope you have seen what ue4 can do in its 4.22 build with raytracing though DXR ,
ive read that epic provided lots of the rendering code for eevee , so i wanted to as if you could contact epic . becasue its really amazing, contrary to popular believe it doesnt just work on rtx cards but also on gtx1060 and upward… its not fast enough for gaming on the non-rtx cards but rendering a movie clip from ue4 works perfect with perfect gi , ao, and shadowing from the environment texture … setting up lighting is so rad and looks so good

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ive read that epic provided lots of the rendering code for eevee

they did not.

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hmm ok , maybe i mixed something up, its been more than a year that i first read about eevee… still the stuff is impressive with the realtime(or very fast) lighting …

eevee is like the best thing ever , i just hope you guys realy pull everything out of this gem , for homemade animation with nice looking graphics its already enough, everyone can now make his little toonseries or shortmovie or just awesome looking testclips , it already looks better than many preschool 3d series on tv …

but the realtime gi stuff is a gamechanger for unreal engine´s graphics … praying XD

You are probably confused because both blenders principled shader and UE’s material are modeled after(/inspired by) the Disney’s principled BRDF.

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From what I can see, the new driver support for Optix Ray Tracing on non-RTX GPUs is mostly a compatibility feature so developers can (hopes Nvidia) develop only for the Optix API. It may not provide any advantage over the existing Cycles native CUDA ray tracing code, so may be of little or no benefit to Blender users.

Optix RTX on 20x0 and later cards would be nice to have, but it’s just a performance thing. Sure, in some cases it will give you an effective quality improvement just because you’ll be able to add another GI bounce or whatever within your rendering time budget, but it’s not going to be anything you can’t do today by just buying a faster or additional GPU.

So in terms of “exciting potential Cycles/Eevee features”, RTX support doesn’t seem that high on the list, at least to me.

Well… no matter what GPU you purchase, a card with raytracing hardware support is going to be faster than a card with no raytracing hardware, so I disagree, you cannot do the same just purchasing a faster card… basically because no faster card exist, and from now on, probably, no card without raytracing hardware will exist (in the same quality line, also AMD will come under Vulkan).

Don´t forget also that a proper implementation of RTX would also mean implementing proper support for NvLink and RAM addition, so 2x2080Ti means 22Gb of GPU Ram for rendering.

Also for Eevee a lot of problems would be solved with RTX integration, for example right now you cannot do a light/space changing environment, you would need to bake the probes at every frame, and this would kill the Eevee rendering performance in complex scenes, while with RTX you are going to be able to avoid that problem.

So RTX should be high in the priority list IMHO, both for Eevee and Cycles.

Cheers!

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Any update yet?

I know development takes time, but it’s been almost 9 months since the release of RTX cards. I’m surprised the Nvidia devs are taking so long :frowning:

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Yes, good question, it could be great to know a bit about this :slight_smile:

They (nvidia) have been working on OSL on the GPU for years now, and they are equally tight-lipped there, I have seem similar messaging coming from both the blender and osl people though “When there is something to announce the people working on it will do it, it’s not up to us to do so”

So while I’m as curious as you are, I’m not expecting much of a response here, but hey surprises are always good!

There is an article in nvidia blog. Dated on 2018.08.13, it names a bunch of companies were already adopting nvidia rtx capabilities. Blender was mentioned in that article as well. Now it looks like nvidia said something, well, far before it became true.

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on every last nvidia video about RTX people keep asking about blender
https://www.youtube.com/

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They added the support now for every major software except blender… They could say that they are working on it or…

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OFFICIAL NEWS IN TWO WEEKS

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