Blender 2.78b Brings 10x Cycles Speedups

Bart · February 10, 2017

The Cycles speedups that were announced last month are now available in a new official build! Some specific areas, like hair rendering, will see an performance boost of up to 10x!

This is a 2.78a release-compatible update with important speedups, especially in Cycles and for Dependency graph.
Most notable will be faster rendering of Motion blur with hair, which has a 5-10 time speedup – important for production rendering.

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Author Bart

I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-) I also run the Blender Artists forum and I'm Community Lead at n8n.

11 responses

Brian Lockett

10 February 2017 at 12:46

Playing around with an updated release of Blender.

Perfect thing to do when your world outside is covered with snow.

Vilém Duha

10 February 2017 at 13:57

It’s definitely great news, but it should be noted that the 10x speedups are with deformation motion blur.
However there are definitely a great amount of other performance improvements, so overall the renderer has improved amazingly!

Reaction

10 February 2017 at 14:19

Sometimes it’s the smallest things… “Sorting on Animation Editors: Alphabetical sort option, Fuzzy/Multi-Word name filtering,” is something I needed ever since I started using Blender, and in 2.78a it appeared. At last I can find objects on the DopeSheet! Would one of those multi-million dollar corporations ever listen to a customer’s feature request like that? Blender does it again ;-)

bob

10 February 2017 at 15:59

macOS (Sierra) – GPU rendering does not work.
Black materials when F12. Blender crashing immediately after switch to Cycles in viewport.
I beg you to fix this. Thank you.

Steve
11 February 2017 at 00:27
Cuda rendering fails with my 2013 mbp with 750M graphics. Generally GPU rendering isn’t worth it on an Apple laptop anyway, but thought I’d mention it since blender 2.78a does seem to work fine.
Oh and Open cl gets stuck on “compiling” on every blender version I’ve tried
Still thanks for the release!
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roofoo
14 February 2017 at 17:36
Yep it’s a confirmed bug, hopefully there will be a 2.78c soon. In the meantime I’m still using 2.78a.
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