SAN JOSE, CA — At the recent GPU Technology Conference, Chaos Group (chaosgroup.com) demonstrated new performance breakthroughs in GPU rendering and realtime ray tracing. Starting with the first public preview of its next-generation V-Ray GPU renderer, ChaosGroup showed how the company has been able to take advantage of Nvidia RTX ray-tracing cores to achieve its fastest rendering speeds to date.
Now in development, a new version of Chaos Group’s V-Ray rendering engine is being custom built to take full advantage of the dedicated ray tracing cores available in Nvidia RTX GPUs. Working in collaboration with Nvidia engineers, the Chaos development team has achieved their fastest GPU rendering speeds to date. On average, when compared to the current CUDA version, benchmarks of the new RTX-powered V-Ray GPU are over twice as fast and up to four times faster for select scenes.
“We’re always looking to take advantage of the latest hardware capabilities in our solutions, and the RTX cards are an exciting new development for ray tracing,” says Vlado Koylazov, Chaos Group co-founder and CTO. “And this is just the beginning. We’re excited to see how these faster rendering speeds will benefit artists and designers.”
The new RTX-enabled version of V-Ray GPU shown at GTC already includes what is needed to render most production scenes, such as motion blur, hair, particles and subsurface scattering. For release, Chaos Group plans to support all V-Ray GPU features, including volume rendering, and whenever an Nvidia RTX card is detected, the speed increase will be automatic.
In addition to high-performance GPU production rendering, NVIDIA RTX hardware drives Chaos Group’s realtime ray tracer, Project Lavina. Unlike traditional realtime engines that recently layer raster graphics with ray-traced effects, Project Lavina is 100 percent ray traced. This provides the highest level of accuracy and realism, while drastically simplifying content creation workflows.
Since its debut at SIGGRAPH 2018, Lavina development has progressed rapidly. Notably, the Lavina team has implemented a new denoising algorithm for near noise-free interactivity. Current builds also include support for collision detection, procedural textures and V-Ray’s proprietary Light Cache global illumination for substantially better light quality in interior scenes.