Archive notice: This article was originally published on 29 July 2020. It has been translated into English and lightly edited for clarity while preserving its historical context.
Redshift on Metal
Maxon previewed a Metal port of Redshift for contemporary Apple hardware. Moving the GPU-compute backend from Nvidia CUDA to Apple’s Metal API was intended to bring the renderer to current Mac workstations. Registered users were expected to receive a test build after the public beta of macOS 11 Big Sur became available.
The Metal demonstration begins at approximately 04:40 in the recording.
Redshift RT
Redshift RT was presented as a hybrid renderer combining ray tracing and rasterisation for near-realtime feedback in complex scenes. The development build used the same materials and lights as the production renderer. A demonstration showed Nvidia’s USD Attic sample scene inside Maya with global illumination enabled.
RT was still under development, with an initial alpha planned for later in 2020. Redshift 3.0 experimental builds were available to registered users on Windows, Linux and macOS, while no public release date had been announced.
Studios should test device support, material parity, numerical differences and scene stability before moving an established rendering pipeline to either backend.
Sources
https://www.3dmotionshow.com/
https://developer.nvidia.com/usd
