The RTX cards natively support some ray tracing. So besides the normal increase expected with the power of the new cards, will we also see another jump in performance if the card is an RTX.
What would the benefits be if any for eevee and cycles?
I think it’s impossible to tell until we have an RTX version of cycles. As far as I can tell, RTX is similar to Intel’s Embree in that your ray tracer needs to have code written in to support it. That’ll probably be a while before that happens. But beyond that, the GTX versions should be out before Christmas so we see tests once that happens.
Weird I watched the release video but I totally missed that info. It sucks to see that the ram limits have actually gone backward. 2070 will have 6 gig instead of 8 like the current 1070. Why would they do that?
Wait, are you sure this is real?
Edit: Wait, I’m an idiot. I was seeing 6 giga-rays and thinking it was saying 6 Gigabytes.
yeah, it was live moments ago… with pre order allowed and all of that…
in fact, in some places the 2070 is out of stock already, haha…
No, using the raytracing/machine-learning hardware requires explicit software support.
As things stand, Cycles would need to integrate with Optix, Eevee would be needed to be ported to Vulkan (when NVIDIA supports that).
Both would require non-trivial developer effort, but maybe NVIDIA can find it in their hearts pockets to fund development for that.
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Ton said this on his Twitter account: “NVIDIA released Optix (ray-trace library) as part of drivers install, making it compatible with GPL and Blender. Another great step is NVIDIA releasing material library MDL as BSD. NVIDIA is happy to support us making it all happen. More details in coming months”
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Very excited to see MDL integrated into Blender!
Quake 1 model format coming to Blender! Exciting stuff! 
Oh “Material Definition Language”!?
Yes, I was obsessed with Quake as a teenager. Still am actually. I hope Quake 1 gets a revival like Doom and Wolfenstein.
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So it’s not worth it to invest in the new cards at least not in the nearest future…
I have read rumors that GTX 2060 will come with 5GB vRAM and will be almost as fast as GTX 1080, with a price between $200 and $300. I’m not sure if manufacturers will release 2060 versions with even more vRAM. If this is true (especially the price), it would be a good choice for Cycles and Eevee even if it does not have RT technology.
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So, looking at the number of Cuda cores, clock speed and memory speed, I don’t see how that’s possible. I have a feeling that these chips will be only mildly faster than the previous generation in just raw Cuda speed. Where it will be worth it, will be once people integrate OptiX into their renderers. But if you buy one expecting the card to run 6 times faster than the previous generation in GPGPU, my sense is that you’ll be dissapointed.
Still needs to be seen but my guess from looking at the raw specs, the upgrade here is in the RTX core and less raw Cuda speed.
Yes, maybe it’s just rumors:
And perhaps not related to CUDA computation either,
What is not clear to me is whether GTX 2060 still has the same Pascal architecture as 10xx series.
Cycles never works with new generation cards on launch because of the way the the CUDA application is packaged inside of blender. Wait a couple of months and it should be supported by then.
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found presentation slides from gamescom.
It’s in Germany, pretty close to Netherlands. Maybe time for BF to start sending people to gamescom also.
I hope we see the Ray Tracing acceleration added to Eevee. It looks promising with that tweet from Ton.
But in the papers they mention something that might be interesting for Cycles and offline rendering.
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Content Creation Workflows
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- Path traced reference
Seems to be some experiments with Path Tracing done with UE4. Maybe there are some parts Cycles.
I’m still trying to find some more background on that tweet by Ton, as far as I can tell Optix is still entirely proprietary and I don’t see any way (from looking at the documentation) of using Optix without linking against it statically or dynamically. The dynamic library is not part of the driver (on my system).
For now, the only GPL-compatible way I see is through the Vulkan extension, which won’t work with either Eevee or Cycles for now.
A standalone Cycles binary (not linked to Blender) on the other hand could link to any proprietary library.
As for NVIDIA’s MDL, while there is an open-source version, some of the more interesting features like GLSL codegen (required for Vulkan/OpenGL engines like Eevee) are not available there.
There’s a bit more background in his post-SIGGRAPH blog:
The day after the keynote I had an hour meeting with 9 (!) Nvidia product managers/engineers. Needless to say, just only about one topic: how do we get Optix and MDL in Blender. It was a productive meeting with a good outcome. Nvidia has to internally sign this off still, so I can’t say more now.
Sounds like he may have talked them into changing the distribution and possibly licensing of Optix to the point that it could be linked to Blender/Cycles without violating the GPL.
Would including the necessary libraries in the Nvidia driver (I don’t think a version of the driver with this change is out yet) be sufficient to count for the GPL’s exception for system libraries?
Yeah that was my take on it too. It sounded to me like they are “going to” make it open source when it’s realeased with the RTX cards.
But, no one can say for sure just yet since it sounds like there are legalities involved. That usually takes time.
Thanks for the info.
I would think so. From a developer’s perspective, if I ask the system to load some shared library (e.g. “Optix51.dll”) I don’t necessarily control where it comes from or what its implementation is, similar to OpenGL.
If however it isn’t installed on the system, then I need to bundle it with the application, which is a problem.