Archive republication: This article was originally published in 2021. Product features, pricing, availability, company status, credits and links reflect the information available at that time.
Cycles X
The Blender Foundation unveiled Cycles X, a major reworking of its Cycles production renderer. Graphics software engineer Brecht Van Lommel said the project aimed to prepare Blender’s production rendering for the following decade.
Features
Cycles X was expected to ship with Blender 3 no earlier than six months after the announcement. Its goals included faster rendering on contemporary GPUs, better viewport interactivity, and improvements to resumable and incremental rendering.
Architecture
Van Lommel explained that historical architectural decisions had begun to constrain performance and make the Cycles codebase harder to maintain. Together with Sergey Sharybin, he launched Cycles X as a research project intended to address those constraints through a more fundamental redesign rather than isolated optimisations.
Further information
The Blender Developers Blog announcement presented early Cycles X results. The video below marked the tenth anniversary of Cycles and introduced the new project.
Cycles X
