GPU Renderer Overhaul (Arnold 7.2.5.0)

• Better GPU startup time: The cold cache pre-population time is up to 14x faster than before. This means that the time to first pixel of the first few renders after an Arnold upgrade will now be significantly faster. This overhead is now low enough that we no longer do a cache pre-population step.

• Better multi-GPU scaling: Render time scaling with multiple GPUs has been improved in scenes with many AOVs. When adding a second GPU, the robot soldier scene with 9 AOVs goes from having just a 1.1x speedup in the previous version of Arnold to a 1.7x speedup in Arnold 7.2.5.

• Newly supported features: the following features are now supported on GPU:

  • multiple render sessions.
  • autobump on per-face displacement shaders, previously, autobump would use the first shader applied.
  • motion blur on the sphere primitive.
  • shader parameter on skydome lights.
  • polygons edge type in the wireframe shader.
  • OSL LPE writing via debug closures.
  • image shader file wrap mode.
  • ID mode in utility shader.
  • edgelength mode in utility shader.
  • the GPU texture filtering logic has been improved such that there is a closer match to the CPU renderer.
  • a number of fixes have been made to the GPU color management logic such that there is a closer match to the CPU renderer when rendering multiple sessions with different color management setting.

• Improved performance: The following production scenes show improved startup time better scaling on multiple GPUs, lower memory usage and faster rendering. The speedups and memory gains are scene dependant and are more visible on scenes with large number of textures.

Release Information

Version:

7.2.5

Release Date:

13 December 2023

Release Notes

Review the release notes here.