Reference/Release Notes/3.6/Cycles
< Reference | Release Notes | 3.6
Cycles
GPU Rendering
AMD
Experimental support for AMD hardware ray-tracing acceleration on Windows, using HIP RT. (557a245)
- This improves performance on GPUs with ray tracing acceleration - RX 6000 and RX 7000 series, as well as W6000 and W7000 series workstation GPUs.
- Driver version 22.40.51.06 for Blender 3.6 Beta needs to be installed, along with enabling HIP RT in Preferences > System.
- Known limitations:
- No Linux support, as HIP RT is Windows only still.
- Degenerate triangles may causes crashes or poor performance.
- Shadows in hair are not rendering accurately.
AMD GPUs now also support light trees. (d5757a0)
Intel
Hardware ray-tracing acceleration for Intel® Arc™ and Data Center GPUs, using Embree 4. (3f8c995109)
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- Known limitations:
- During their first use with oneAPI device, Ambient Occlusion and Bevel nodes will trigger a GPU binaries recompilation that will use around 9GB of memory and take several minutes. Improvements on this may come from future GPU drivers.
- On Windows, when using drivers < 101.4644, embree on GPU may crash when rendering duration goes beyond 3 minutes.
Apple
Apple Silicon GPUs now support NanoVDB for Metal, reducing memory usage of volumes. (02c2970983)
Performance
- Light trees now use less memory and are faster to build, through instancing and multi-threading. (bfd1836861, 23c5e06932)
- Loading large geometries into Cycles is much faster, meaning rendering can start more quickly after geometry changes or switching to rendered view.
- Loading large meshes 4-6x faster, and mesh attributes are copied up to 10x faster (or even 60x faster for an extreme example with UV maps) (4bcd59d644, 8d0920ec6d).
- Loading point clouds can be 9x faster (aef0e72e5a).
- Loading curves can be 10x faster (ae017b3ab7).
Other Improvements
- OSL: support for new standard microfacet closures from MaterialX (
dielectric_bsdf
,conductor_bsdf
,generalized_schlick_bsdf
). - Byte color attributes are now supported for point clouds and curves (5a86c4cc88).
- Improved Fresnel handling of the Glass BSDF for better energy preservation and accuracy of results at high roughness. (D17149)
- Bump mapping for diffuse surfaces was improved. (PR #105776)