Saturday, March 14th, 2020 Posted by Jim Thacker

cebas ships finalRender Drop 4


Cebas Visual Technology has released finalRender Drop 4, the latest update to its 3ds Max renderer, updating the software from version 6 to version 7 of Nvidia’s OptiX GPU ray tracing framework.

The change makes it possible for users with current-gen RTX GPUs to use the cards’ RT cores to accelerate renders; and to pool GPU memory across compatible GPUs via Nvidia’s NVLink system.

Support for RT cores accelerates ray tracing on Nvidia RTX graphics cards
Although cebas introduced native support for RTX GPUs in the previous update to finalRender, it was confined to OptiX’s render denoising system.

Drop 4 extends that to rendering, with users able to use the RT cores in RTX cards to accelerate ray tracing: in the test scene shown in the video above, enabling RTX support accelerates the render 161%.

That compares favourably to the figures Chaos Group reported on introducing RTX acceleration in V-Ray last year, although its blog post notes that the speed boost is heavily scene-dependent.

cebas’s video also shows test scenes rendering 52% and 83% faster in finalRender Drop 4 than in Drop 3.

In addition, the move to OptiX 7 enables finalRender users to pool GPU memory on compatible GPUs via Nvidia’s NVLink technology, making it possible to render larger scenes without going out of core.

finalRender’s CPU render core has been updated to the latest version of Intel’s Embree ray tracing framework, which is now the sole option for CPU rendering.

New car paint shader, plus other performance improvements
Other new features in Drop 4 include fR-CarPaint, a new pearlescent-style car paint shader that takes advantage of finalRender’s support for spectral rendering.

The update also adds support for 3ds Max’s native photometric lights as well as finalRender’s native ones and full support for 3ds Max’s native texture baking.

Performance improvements include a speed boost of “up to 10 times” when instancing Forest Pack trees, and unquantified speed boosts to volume rendering and processing of layered materials and HDRs.

Pricing and availability
FinalRender is available for 3ds Max 2017+. The software is rental-only, with subscriptions priced at $24.50/month or $294/year.

An Unlimited GPU subscription, which lets finalRender run on more than two workstation GPUs, costs a further $294/year; as does an Unlimited Network subscription, which lets it run on unlimited render nodes.

Read more about the new features in finalRender Drop 4 on cebas’s website