Yahoo Lifestyle Engadget has been testing and reviewing consumer tech since 2004. Our stories may include affiliate links; if you buy something through a link, we may earn a commission. Read more about how we evaluate products.
NVIDIA's latest RTX Studio drivers make Blender four times faster
The speed will be a big benefit for GeForce RTX users on a budget.
NVIDIA's latest Studio RTX driver isn't just speeding up commercial production renderers like V-Ray. If you use the free, open-source Blender 3D animation software, you'll also get a boost, NVIDIA announced. With the new driver, the Blender Cycles renderer will provide real-time rendering and boost performance by four times compared to using a CPU alone.
Cycles uses NVIDIA's OptiX ray-tracing renderer to deliver more realistic effects like subsurface scattering and motion blur. OptiX has only used slower CUDA technology up until now, but since the RTX cards are specifically designed for ray-tracing, they deliver a significant boost. "With NVIDIA RTX, core ray-tracing operations are now hardware accelerated by the GPU, making this the fastest version of Cycles yet," said Blender's lead architect, Brecht Van Lommel.
Blender and Cycles are free, open-source software often used by low-budget users and producers. As such, the RTX speed boost will be particularly welcome for folks using GeForce RTX GPUs -- available in Studio versions from quite a few manufacturers -- which are significantly cheaper than NVIDIA's fancier Quadro RTX GPUs. The new driver is now available for download here -- select "Studio Driver (SD)" in the "Download Type" drop-down menu.
