New builds of E-Cycles 2.91 and 2.92 are up (30% off until tomorrow)!
Made with E-Cycles over the last 2 weeks:
https://twitter.com/PMikulicic/status/1327572019945336832
https://twitter.com/Luan3dr_b/status/1324876519227977730
https://twitter.com/ChrisLyon_SF/status/1323132032281698304
https://twitter.com/johannes_wilde/status/1329183174702796802
Hi Mathieu,
If I buy the RTX 3090 Iāll use the 3090 and 2080Ti together.
What Iām curious about
How is Vram used in this case?
Will it fit into the 3090ās 24GB?
Or will it fit into 11GB of the 2080Ti?
Or is the 2080Ti only used up to 11GB? While 3090 is working
Thank you.
I believe only NVLink connected GPUs can add VRAM together. In other words, you are limited to the amount of VRAM of the smaller GPU, so 11GB if both GPUs are enabled. It is my understanding that all GPU renderers work this way, since generally the scene is fully loaded into each GPU. You can always disable your 2080Ti if you need full 24GBā¦
Hasnāt Nvidia said that the drivers support using system memory in addition to GPU memory, albeit at a slower speed? Iāve never found Blender to be able to use above the physical GPU memory. Does it take special support because it sure would be nice if this were true:
Oh, that is news to me. This must be something kinda new, right?.. Hmmmā¦ I will need to look into this when I get a chanceā¦
I think this may just be Microsoft being dumb and mixing the GPUās VRAM with address space reserved for the GPU, not actual memory available for use by the GPU. 
Thank you Norka
I wasnāt sure because other renderers in 3Ds Max display lower VRAM, but Blender displays higher VRAM.
Then I have to sell 2080 Ti at a shit price. 
Donāt sell anything yet, for shit prices or otherwise, until others chime in on this. Obviously me and obsurveyor are not authorities on this matter.
@Hyesung Yes, donāt make decisions based on something I may have misread.
Nvidia has confusing names for the different types of CUDA memory(virtual, shared and global) and itās possible, along with Windowsā poor enumeration of GPU memory, that the feature just doesnāt exist and is a confabulation. It would be super nice though. 
If you have 3x PCI-E for GPUs and enough room for it, you can also buy another 2080Ti at a āniceā price from this perspective and connect those with NVlink. You will then have 2x2080Ti with 22GB and a 3090 with 24GB, so that you can render scenes of 22GB on 3 cards in parallel.
You can only pool memory of GPUs connected with NVLink. As far as I heard, the 3090 has a new type of NVLink and will only work with other 3090 cards.
E-Cycles 2020
E-Cycles 2.91 is officially released. New features and improvements since 2.90.1 include:
even faster viewport rendering
High Quality Pass mode for very crisp textures and detail rich denoising
enhanced clay and AO rendering
continued support for CUDA on Mac (Gladiator artwork below made by Marco Iozzi with E-Cycles for Mac)
E-Cycles 2021
E-Cycles 2.92/2021 first alphas are available. They already include a new feature: SSAA for details-rich viewport denoising (you can zoom in the following GIF to better see)!
E-Cycles 2021 as a stand alone product will be available when 2.92 is stable enough. Prices will be the same as in 2020 with $149 for E-Cycles 2021 standard and $299 for E-Cycles 2021 standard.
You can already get a pack with E-Cycles 2021 included on the Blender Market. During the Black Friday Sales you can get the packs at $168 and $336 respectively, which is like getting E-Cycles 2020 for $19 and E-Cycles RTX 2020 for $37.
Happy rendering!
how is with animation this HQ AI denoiser?
It highly depend on the scenes and especially the lightning. Generally, animations require more samples than stills to have enough temporal stability. For Archviz fly-throughs with AI-Denoiser, I use around 100 spp per frame generally. An exemple at 100spp using an Evermotion scene (it was made with OptiX back then):
x2 2080Ti with NVLink is a really good idea right now. Especially with E-Cycles.
Thank you Mathieu
Hi, I have a problem with the latest 2.91 build. Itās so laggy with a simple scene and a basic setting. You can see here
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bAHZALI9fb_tjCjt0D12ZVmlmDJPFhwT/view?usp=sharing
It still seem to be fine in 2.90 build.
Itā normal, the GPU compute option is greyed out, which means Blender is using CPU. Itās a bug in Blender, you can reactivate it by just opening the user preferences and going to the system tab -> check that CUDA or OptiX is selected
The Blender Market is crashing since an hour. New GPUs from NVidia and AMD are extremely expensive or not available. What a luck! You can get better performance for a fraction of the price with E-Cycles 2021 on Gumroad. You can get E-Cycles 2021 and E-Cycles 2021 RTX with 25% off with this coupon during Black Friday and until Sunday.
First E-Cycles 2021 alpha builds are already available with 2x faster path tracing on average, persistent data, SSAA rendering, the new AI-Denoiser mode and viewport light groups!
100% compatibility with Cycles assets, materials and add-ons
Most render engines requires you to convert your materials and are most of the time incompatible with add-ons containing assets. With E-Cycles, you can focus on your art and start production the second after you started it. All your existing scenes, assets and add-ons will work out-of the box!
Happy Rendering!
Ahh I see. It not have any GPU option in OptiX when open Blender preferences. Looks like I have to stay in 2.90 for a while XD
Hi, Mathieu.
As it looks like new improvements for E-Cycles seem to be for 2.9x versions, are updates and speed improvements also coming to 2.83 LTS? Iām planning software used for my future work and going to mostly stick with Blender LTS versions, so would appreciate if Iād get updates also. This is one thing for me to consider if should purchase E-Cycles update in 2021.
