Friday, June 12th, 2015 Posted by Jim Thacker

Cebas ships moskitoRender Subscription Drop 2


MoskitoRender in action, in a demo video posted last year. Cebas’s latest subscriber-only update introduces separate builds of the 3ds Max production renderer tailored to individual generations of Nvidia GPUs.

Cebas has released Subscription Drop 2 for moskitoRender: a subscriber-only update that promises to tailor the GPU-based renderer for 3ds Max to the Nvidia GPU that you are using.

A build of moskitoRender for every generation of Nvidia GPUs
According to cebas, when users select their current GPU from its Product Manager tool before they upgrade, the manager will automatically choose a version of moskitoRender optimised for their graphics hardware.

It isn’t literally a case of one build for every compatible card, but there is a build for every generation of Nvidia GPU kernels from Fermi – the Quadro x000 series – onwards.

If you’re mixing cards from different generations, there are also Fermi-Maxwell and Maxwell-Kepler builds.

Of course, this only works if you’re using an Nvidia GPU: since moskitoRender is based on CUDA, not OpenCL, you don’t benefit from GPU acceleration if you’re using an AMD card.

So what’s the benefit to the user?
The new system should mean that users of newer GPUs are no longer limited by performance restrictions imposed internally within the software to make it compatible with older cards.

As an example, cebas cites the number of texture slots available in Fermi GPUs. “Because software developers could only support the least common denominator in a platform, this would [impose] a limit of 64 textures.”

It’s an interesting approach: as far as we’re aware, this is the first time a developer has released individual builds of its software dedicated to particular GPUs, as opposed to hotfixes or optional updates.

If anyone has any insight into what difference the custom builds make to performance in production, we’d love to hear from you.

Read more about Subscription Drop 2 for moskitoRender in cebas’s official news release