Blender 2.81 Alpha With RTX Support

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The Blender developers added RTX support for Nvidia GPUs in the new Blender 2.81 Alpha version!

Although it has been a long time ago since my last post I still follow recent Blender news.

What I want to inform about today is the support for Nvidia RTX GPUs as Blender announces on their wiki page. Recent updates has been made as well on sculpt, eevee, viewport and rigging.

The RTX support can be found in the ‘Cycles’ category under Nvidia RTX. The hardware-accelerated raytracing on these GPUs must be enabled in the preferences under System > Cycles Render Devices. The feature is called Optix and yet it does not support all CUDA features. Support for single and multi-GPU rendering is already available.

OptiX in Cycles Render Devices (source: Blender.org)

OptiX needs Windows driver version 435.80 or newer or Linux driver version 435.12. I’d recommend to just update your Nvidia drivers when you first start with this experimental version of Blender.

The wiki article also states that the OptiX kernel needs to be compiled when you start the first render approach which may take a few minutes.

Aptix performance compared to CPU and CUDA (source: Blender.org)

The OptiX feature was contributed by NVIDIA, thank you NVIDIA.

Here you can download the experimental version Blender 2.81 Alpha (writing date: 2019-09-22).

Update: Blender on Youtube released a new video in their “Blender Today Live” show. Here they Pablo Vazquez talkes about the new OptiX feature:

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