Nvidia GTX 1080 8GB – Slightly faster, 50% more expensive than 1070.(We have those for our workstations on top of 970s for viewport) Nvidia GTX 1070 8GB – Probably the best choice at the moment if you don’t need 12 GB of memory.V-Ray supports OpenCL, but I find that CUDA GPUs offer better performance for the same money. That said, you can still use it for lighting preview and shading, but you have to expect that some features will be missing or may work in a different way.Ĭurrently RT is at fully production ready state and to me it has proven to be best way to create amazing renders.Īt this stage I recommend CUDA devices. Going back and forth to CPU (Adv) is not the best idea in the same way that jumping between Corona, Octane and V-Ray in the middle of production isn’t. Shade, light, render previews, finals with RT. Looking at V-Ray RT as a completely different engine is the key to loving it.

And I believe that now it’s the best time to start using it in production. I’m extremely happy that Chaos Group didn’t dismiss GPU rendering as being ‘too hard’ and pushed hard with development. At earlier stages there were some differences in renders from RT and ADV due to many missing features, but that changed a lot over time due to fast development.

I thought it’s just ‘real time’ addition to V-Ray Adv. One thing that I feel is a bit unfortunate is that for a very long time I did understand it’s true potential. We’ve chosen V-Ray RT as our main rendering engine at the end, but It took us some time be convinced. This alone made it possible to render 70-80% of our scenes. It changed with launch of Nvidia’s maxwell cards that came with 4GB on board, did cost fraction of their Quadro brothers and were much faster and more energy-efficient than earlier generation. But back when GPUs had 512-1024 MB of memory it wasn’t really a production ready solution (at least for us). It wasn’t the first time I tried rendering on graphic cards. It took time to change the mindset, but the speed boost and interactivity were there to help and sooth any pain caused by some V-Ray Adv features missing. We loved it!… Well, to be honest not straight away.

So we installed new GPUs (it was GTX970 4GB) and decided to see how things improved with rendering on GPU with V-Ray RT. It all started around 18 months ago when we decided to do a hardware upgrade to get better 3ds Max viewport performance. Everything below this point is based on our experience with using V-Ray GPU (RT) as our main production renderer.

The aim of this guide is to help with switching to rendering on GPU with V-Ray and has all the basic information needed to better understand advantages and limitations of this approach.

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