Vray GPU hardware agnostic?

[seandunderdale]

A question that will become more important as we get closer to Ampere and Big Navi release. Is VRay best suited towards a particular brand of GPU? I assume RTX mode pulls its name from Nvidia RT cores, (maybe Im wrong) but it implies some development done with a particular manufacturer. Am I wrong here? Or can we go out and buy whichever cards performs best at the end of the year, assuming there are no weird driver / unforseen compatibility issues.

[Muhammed_Hamed]

Pretty much all GPU rendering is based on CUDA or Optix, so you need Nvidia GPUs
And yes, Chaos helped Nvidia with Optix 7 .. Optix is the future of GPU rendering

[seandunderdale]

Good to know. Clears things up. Thanks!

[Joelaff]

Could you elaborate on the differences between CUDA and RTX modes? One problem is that RTX mode doesn't currently (VRay5 Max) seem to be able to support using the CPU as well. Otherwise in quick testing I didn't see a huge difference.

[Muhammed_Hamed]

Could you elaborate on the differences between CUDA and RTX modes? One problem is that RTX mode doesn't currently (VRay5 Max) seem to be able to support using the CPU as well. Otherwise in quick testing I didn't see a huge difference.

Hey!
RTX mode is based on Optix API from Nvidia and makes use of tensor cores in the touring GPUs. If you have an touring GPU, you need to use RTX as it is much faster than Cuda. My ineterior scenes are at least 50% faster with RTX mode(I'm using 2x Titan RTX)
Some other scenes have seen much more speed benefit .. up to 200% see here

https://www.chaosgroup.com/blog/v-ra...for-nvidia-rtx

In my view, it doesn't matter that RTX mode doesn't use Hybrid rendering. In most cases it is so much faster without it

[Joelaff]

Thanks for the info. I was testing it on a thread ripper CPU with a GTX 2080Ti. I still think the hybrid was faster, though they were close. I was not timing, just feeling the responsiveness. Further testing is in order.

Is there any future in RTX hybrid?

[Muhammed_Hamed]

Yeah, it is planned to be supported soon. Chaos confirmed this should work in future.
And about RTX, Optix 7 is just the start. This technology is evolving fast as Nvidia is dedicated to it, we should see more speed/features soon.

[Joelaff]

I appreciate the info, Muhammed. We mainly use CPU still. So I haven't really been keeping up with the GPU stuff. I can't wait until we have more features.