Faster scene loading and light tree building in CyclesĮven if you don’t use AMD or Intel GPUs, there are also a number of performance improvements to Cycles that will be significant in day-to-day work. In the Blender Foundation’s tests using an Intel Arc A770 GPU, enabling hardware ray tracing improved performance on the standard Blender benchmark scenes from 10-40%.ģ.

Support for AMD GPUs is still officially experimental, and is available only on Windows, not Linux.įor Intel users, GPU ray tracing is supported on data center GPUs and the new Arc workstation GPUs via Embree 4.1, the latest version of its previously CPU-only ray tracing libraries.

Hardware-accelerated ray tracing on AMD and Intel GPUsĪnother key change in Blender 3.6 is support for hardware-accelerated ray tracing on AMD and Intel GPUs in Cycles, the software’s main production renderer.Īlthough Cycles already supported GPU rendering on AMD and Intel hardware, lack of dedicated support for the ray tracing cores in the cards meant that performance was significantly lower than on Nvidia GPUs.Ĭycles has supported hardware-accelerated ray tracing on Nvidia GPUs since 2020 via Nvidia’s OptiX API.įor AMD users, GPU ray tracing is officially supported on consumer Radeon RX 60 Series cards and Radeon Pro W6000 and Radeon Pro W7000 Series workstation cards, via AMD’s HIP RT library. There are also performance improvements to Geometry Nodes in general, with memory usage reduced by “at least 25%”, and speed boosts of “at least 10x” when converting between geometry types.Ģ. Simulations can be cached or baked to disk via a new Simulation Nodes panel in the physics tab in the Properties Editor, although baking is limited in the initial release, and has a number of known limitations. Official demo files cover particle systems, geometry fracturing, 2D effects and even soft-body dynamics of a pudding (shown above), while user-created demos range from flocking sims to procedural animation. Undoubtedly the most-hyped – and also one of the most-delayed – new feature in Blender 3.6 is initial support for simulations in the Geometry Nodes toolset.Ī goal even before the toolset was first introduced in Blender 2.92, the change moves Geometry Nodes from being a procedural modelling and object scattering system to being a node-based effects system.Īlthough it still has a very long way to go before it becomes a practical alternative to tools like Houdini, the simulation nodes are already capable of a reasonable range of effects. Support for simulations in Geometry Nodes

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