Maxon releases Redshift 3.5.24
Maxon has released Redshift 3.5.24, the latest version of the production renderer.
The update adds support for the hardware-accelerated ray tracing technology in Apple’s new M3 processors, which should improve final-quality rendering performance on the latest Macs.
Core renderer: support for hardware-accelerated ray tracing on Apple’s M3 processors
The main change in Redshift 3.5.24 is native support for the hardware-accelerated ray tracing tech in Apple’s M3 processors, available in new iMacs and MacBook Pros.
Maxon describes the update as bringing “substantial performance enhancements”, although it doesn’t quantify the likely speed boost: we’ll update the story if we can get any numbers.
Updated 15 March 2024: Maxon declined to provide figures, citing the difficulty in identifying a typical production scene or hardware set-up.
Apple Silicon M3 processors are supported only for Redshift’s primary final-quality GPU render engine, not interactive rendering with the Windows-and-NVIDIA-only Redshift RT.
Other changes namechecked in Maxon’s blog post announcing the update include better interpolation in the ramp shader, where a bug has been fixed with steped gradients.
Houdini plugin: quality-of-life updates, includihg to material overrides
The Houdini plugin also gets a fair number of quality-of-life improvements, including the option to render both regular and deep AOVs from a single ROP without reloading the scene.
There are also changes to material overrides, including the option to have multiple overrides on Redshift Proxy objects; and to override only surface attributes on scene objects without affecting bump and displacement inputs, as shown in the image above.
Price and system requirements
Redshift 3.5.24 is available for Windows 10, glibc 2.17+ Linux and macOS 12.6/13.3+.
The renderer’s integration plugins are compatible with 3ds Max 2018+, Blender 2.83+, Cinema 4D R21+, Houdini 17.5+ (18.0+ on macOS), Katana 4.0v1+ and Maya 2018+.
The software is rental-only, with subscriptions costing $45/month or $264/year.
Read an overview of the new features in Redshift 3.5.24 on the software’s Trello board
Read a full list of changes in Redshift 3.5.24 on the Redshift forum
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