Blender Development

SIGGRAPH: Accelerating Cycles using NVIDIA RTX

Bart ·

NVIDIA developer Patrick Mours has released a patch for Optix raytracing acceleration in Cycles. His code adds a completely new rendering 'backend', next to Cuda and OpenCL. The code is currently in review, but first results already predict a 25-50% render speedups.

Patrick writes:

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.

In this blog, I’ll discuss the technical approach taken, review performance you can expect and share possible a future direction.

Link

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.
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