Sitni Sati is preparing the release of FumeFX 7.5 for 3ds Max, introducing NVIDIA CUDA acceleration for smoke and fire simulation. The developer reports a performance increase between two- and five-fold compared to CPU-based simulations.
The GPU acceleration targets volumetric fluid effects such as explosions, smoke and fire. It supports both simulation and real-time viewport preview. In official demonstrations, the feature ran on an NVIDIA RTX 4090 and produced detailed motion and shading.
No more memory crashes
A common limitation of GPU fluid solvers is restricted video memory. Sitni Sati claims that FumeFX 7.5’s GPU solver automatically falls back to CPU once GPU memory is exceeded. This prevents crashes and lets complex simulations complete without manual intervention. The hybrid approach allows artists to benefit from GPU speed while maintaining the stability of CPU computation. The developer also states that the GPU solver maintains visual detail and motion quality where other sparse fluid solvers may lose resolution. At press time, this claim has not been independently verified.
What remains to be clarified
As of the current beta, Sitni Sati has not published detailed release notes specifying which FumeFX features are fully CUDA-enabled. It is unclear whether all node types, caches, and modifiers run on GPU or whether some processes remain CPU-bound. Likewise, parity between GPU and CPU results, regarding noise behaviour, reproducibility, and memory consumption has not yet been confirmed by third-party testing.
Implications for production
GPU acceleration promises faster iteration for artists working with smoke, fire, and explosion setups, particularly on modern CUDA-based hardware. The automatic CPU fallback adds safety for heavy scenes that exceed GPU resources. Studios should nonetheless test the new GPU mode thoroughly within their pipelines before relying on it for client work, as simulation consistency and cache behaviour can vary across hardware configurations. FumeFX 7.5 remains in beta. Sitni Sati has not yet announced a release date or updated pricing.
