Blender, Keyshot And Modo Will All Support RTX-based Rendering

Last week, SIGGRAPH 2019 was successfully finished. At this SIGGRAPH, the high-tech displays are still amazing. As the leading cloud rendering services provider, Fox Renderfarm supports both GPU and CPU, as one of the well-known GPU render farms, and one of Nvidia's partners, we are happy to know that several DCC applications, like Modo, Keyshot, and Blender, are announced to support Nvidia’s new RTX GPUs on hardware-accelerated ray tracing.

What is RTX? Is it Supported by Other Applications?

First announced last March, RTX is Nvidia’s implementation of DXR, and a new ray tracing extension for DirectX 12. Current RTX GPUs—GeForce RTX consumer graphics, Quadro RTX workstation graphics, and Titan RTX all have dedicated RT hardware cores for ray tracing calculations.

These core software accesses were implemented through the ray tracing architecture provided by Nvidia Optix and announced for free commercial use in 2017. The rendering engine that now supports RTX includes Clarisse iFX, which is mainly for window preview.

For final quality output, Arnold GPU, OctaneRender, Redshift, and Unreal Engine have alpha or beta implementations, the latter being primarily hybrid rasterization/ray tracing renderers.

In Substance Painter and Substance Designer, RTX ray tracing is also used for texture baking.

Keyshot

The Keyshot program will support RTX in the 9th version released this fall. The general function is that if the software detects a compatible GPU in the user system, a new button will appear on the Keyshot ribbon interface to enable GPU rendering. Otherwise, The scene will be rendered normally on the CPU.

Modo

In modo, the situation is more complicated, because Foundry's 3D software already has a GPU rendering engine, which is similar to AMD's Radeon Prorender. In the current form, the prorender is primarily used as an interactive preview during asset development, while modo's original CPU renderer is used for the final quality output.

Foundry's new RTX-based path tracking renderer seems to be a replacement for Reyes-based CPU renderers. Currently Foundry has not specified which version of modo will be available in the new RTX rendering engine, although "in the coming months" plans to release access versions to subscribers in advance.

Blender

There are also two rendering engines for Blender, although they have all been accelerated by the GPU.

This time, the RTX integration is for the old Cycles engine, which has used Nvidia's CUDA API for GPU rendering - users without Nvidia cards use OpenCL and CPU rendering instead of the new OpenGL-based Eeve engine introduced in Blender 2.80.

Like Keyshot, RTX support is switchable, users can select optix, cuda or opencl or pure CPU rendering via the checkbox in Blender's preferences.

In the benchmarks posted on the Blender Developers blog, when running under OptiX, Cycles renders about twice as fast as the same Nvidia GPU when running under CUDA on the Nvidia GPU. The source code for the new implementation is public, but considering that Blender 2.80 has just been released, it may take some time for the RTX to be officially built.

Conclusion

We hope you can learn something from this article. If you need a rendering service, why not try us at Fox Renderfarm, we have been the leading cloud rendering services provider in the industry for many years. Don't understand why you need a render farm? Then why not learn about what is a render farm? Fox Renderfarm continues to bring news of modelling with various 3D software, so feel free to follow us!