Chaos releases Vantage 2.8
Chaos has updated Vantage, its real-time ray tracing renderer, intended for exploring large V-Ray scenes in architectural visualization and visual effects projects.
Vantage 2.8 adds support for light linking, V-Ray’s lens effects and switch material, and Shader Execution Reordering on current NVIDIA GPUs.
A GPU-accelerated ray tracer for exploring large production scenes in real time
First released in 2020, Vantage is a hardware-accelerated ray tracing renderer intended for exploring large V-Ray production scenes in near-real time.
The initial release was targeted at visualization, but in 2023 Chaos added support for rendering deforming meshes, like animated characters, and began pitching Vantage at VFX work.
Vantage 2.8: light linking and lens effects
Key changes in Vantage 2.8 include support for light linking, via include and exclude lists.
The change makes it possible to choose which lights affect which objects in a scene, making it easier to art direct renders, particularly the position of shadows and highlights.
Vantage also now supports the Lens Effects from the V-Ray Frame Buffer (VFB), including bloom and glare, and mimicking the effects of dust and scratches on the lens.
New material and texture options
Vantage also now supports the V-Ray Switch Material, used to switch quickly between variant materials on an asset during look development.
It is also now possible to use source videos as bitmap textures: for example, when rendering TV screens or animated billboards. Vantage supports the H.264, H.265, AV1, VP8 and VP9 codecs.
The update also adds support for the parallax room shader used by third-party architectural visualization asset providers wParallax and Evermotion.
Support for AMD iGPUs and SER on current NVIDIA GPUs
Performance improvements include support for Shader Execution Reordering (SER) providing “performance gains of up to 80%” on current NVIDIA Blackwell and Ada generation GPUs.
Vantage also now supports new AMD integrated GPUs with 16 or more compute units.
Price and system requirements
Chaos Vantage is compatible with Windows 10+ and DXR-compatible AMD, Intel or NVIDIA GPUs. The software is rental-only, with subscriptions costing $108.90/month or $658.80/year.
Read an overview of the new features in Vantage 2.8 on Chaos’s blog
Read a full list of new features in Vantage 2.8 in the online documentation
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