Archive notice: This article was originally published on January 28, 2019. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
At CES 2019, Nvidia now showed a few insights into GPU rendering with Arnold (Autodesk) in Maya – together with the RTX 2080 Ti and RTX 2080 graphics cards respectively. A simple scene can be seen – with only one character, known from Project Sol, several light sources/softboxes and two HDRI dome lights – which is then rendered in the demo. The speed during lookdev is subsequently compared between CPU and GPU. Apart from the very simple setup, however, it is not entirely clear how much difference is made by the OptiX Denoiser alone, which interestingly was not enabled in this demo when rendering with the CPU. The GPU version of Arnold is currently still in private beta; a release or dates for an open beta are not yet known.
Further Software and RTX Support
With the release of Nvidia’s new Turing architecture, the RTX graphics cards enable hardware-accelerated raytracing through dedicated RT cores, among other things. In the past, the real-time demos “Reflections” and “Project Sol” with Unreal Engine particularly made the rounds. Together with the OptiX library, Microsoft DXR and Vulkan, various render engines are currently also preparing to use and support the new RT cores: These include, for example, V-Ray (with Project Lavina), the Redshift 3.0 release announced for Q1 2019, or Octane 2019.
Further Information: To Nvidia’s Website
