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Published: July 30, 2019 | Source: Blender Foundation | Author: Mark Campbell

RTX support is coming to Blender and you can try it starting today!

RTX support is coming to Blender and you can try it starting today!

RTX support is coming to Blender, and you can try it starting today!

The Blender Foundation has announced that they have been working with Nvidia to add support for hardware-accelerated raytracing through the use of Nvidia’s OptiX API and the company’s RTX series of graphics cards. 

At this time, Blender’s Optix source code is undergoing a review, after which support for Nvidia’s RTX series graphics cards will be merged into the mainstream version of Blender, adding OptiX as a new rendering option. This code can be downloaded an used today within Blender, delivering some impressive performance levels. 

OptiX promises to be much faster than Blender’s CUDA back-end, with the software supporting multi-GPU rendering and almost all GPU-supported features within Blender, such as hair, volumes, subsurface scattering and motion blur.  
   

    Over the past few months, NVIDIA worked closely with Blender Institute to deliver a frequent user request: adding hardware-accelerated ray tracing to Cycles. To do this, we created a completely new backend for Cycles with NVIDIA OptiX, an application framework for achieving optimal ray tracing performance on NVIDIA RTX GPUs. Now, Cycles can fully utilize available hardware resources to considerably boost rendering performance.

If you’d like to try it out, the source code is currently undergoing review before being merged and is available for anyone to download, build and run. I’ve provided instructions in the linked review.


RTX support is coming to Blender and you can try it starting today!  

The graph below the kinds of performance gains that users of Blender’s OptiX backend can expect, delivering significant performance benefits over CUDA and faster rendering than Intel’s 12-core Xeon Gold 6126 processor. This speed boost is excellent news for mobile RTX workstations, which cannot fit high core count processors. 

RTX support is coming to Blender and you can try it starting today!  

It only gets better from here!

Moving forward, Blender’s OptiX Back-end is set to be improved by using the Opti X SDK’s AI denoiser, which can be used to remove noise from rendered images and reduce render times. This feature will be added as a toggleable option. AI denoising can be exceptionally useful for viewport rendering. 

You can join the discussion on RTX support coming to Blender on the OC3D Forums. 

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