Pixar unveils the new features of RenderMan 27
Characters from Elio, Pixar’s latest animated feature, used as the header image in the release notes for the current beta build of RenderMan 27.0.
Pixar has posted the beta release notes for RenderMan 27.0, which it describes as the most significant release” of the production renderer for VFX and animation in “over a decade”.
When released publicly, RenderMan 27 will make RenderMan XPU, the software’s hybrid CPU/GPU render engine, ready for final-frame rendering as well as interactive previews.
Key changes in XPU include interactive denoising, deep workflows, support for mattes and holdouts for compositing, extended shading capabilities, and support for multi-GPU rendering.
The updated version of XPU will be available in the free non-commercial edition of RenderMan, and supported in the integration plugins for Blender, Houdini, Katana and Maya.
See RenderMan Marketing Manager Dylan Sisson discuss the changes coming in RenderMan 27 in an interview recorded by French CG news site 3DVF at SIGGRAPH 2025 last month.
RenderMan XPU becomes officially ready for final-frame rendering
The main change in RenderMan 27 – and it’s a massive one – is that RenderMan XPU, the software’s hybrid CPU/GPU render engine, becomes officially ready for final-frame rendering.
Introduced in RenderMan 24 in 2021, and updated in subsequent releases, XPU provides a faster alternative to RIS, RenderMan’s CPU-only render architecture, for look development and interactive rendering, but lacked support for key features needed for final-frame workflows.
In RenderMan 27, the two move much closer to feature parity, with XPU now producing “renders that are predictive of RIS”.
In the video embedded above, RenderMan Marketing Manager Dylan Sisson discusses how Pixar began rendering the upcoming Toy Story 5 using RIS, but switched to XPU during production, using “the same shaders, the same lights, the same assets [and] the same scenes”.
Sisson describes XPU as “just a faster renderer” than RIS, even when it isn’t using the GPU, commenting that “it tests lights faster and it renders faster, even on the CPU [alone]”.
Although RIS is still available in RenderMan 27, it is now due to be deprecated in a “future release”, and studios are encouraged to adopt XPU in production for new projects.
XPU: better support for VFX compositing workflows
As a result, most of the changelog for RenderMan 27 consists of features that were previously only supported in RIS, but which are now also supported in XPU.
For visual effects work, some of the most significant will be the new compositing capabilities, which include support for mattes, holdouts, and deep output.
For deep compositing workflows, RenderMan XPU now has “full support” for OpenEXR Deep IDs, including the ability to automatically generate OpenEXR 3.0-style ID manifests.
The important Cryptomatte matte ID system isn’t supported in RenderMan 27.0, but Pixar plans to do so in a ‘dot release’ – that is, a RenderMan 27.x update.
XPU: support for the new AI denoiser and Stylized Looks
XPU also now supports two of the most significant features added to RenderMan in recent releases: the new interactive denoiser, and the Stylized Looks toolset.
Introduced in RenderMan 25, the AI-trained temporal denoiser reduces iteration times during look development, particularly on scenes with complex lighting or shading setups.
Stylized Looks, originally introduced in RenderMan 24, is a non-photorealistic rendering toolset, capable of a range of stylized output, including cartoon, sketch-like and painterly looks.
In RenderMan 27, it is “not only fully implemented in XPU, but is also greatly expanded”, although the beta release notes don’t provide any detail about the other changes.
XPU: support for more shading and lighting features
For look development, XPU now supports a number of shading features previously only supported in RIS.
That includes full support for Open Shading Language (OSL) display filters, partial support for OSL sample filters, and support for “most” of the getattribute() lookups available to RIS.
There is also initial support for the base MaterialX BSDF nodes and the Add and Mix utility nodes.
And while it isn’t available in the current beta, MaterialX Lama, RenderMan’s layered material system, will be fully supported in XPU in the final release.
Other changes include nested instancing with material inheritance; and improvements to subsurface scattering, single-surface scattering for glass and volumetrics, and hair rendering.
For lighting, XPU now fully supports mesh lights, and supports interior volume aggregates, for more accurate rendering of materials like crystals or murky liquids.
XPU: checkpointing and support for multi-GPU rendering
There are also some significant workflow improvements to XPU, including checkpointing.
XPU can now output partial frames as checkpoints from which it can resume interrupted renders, reducing time spent on re-rendering and improving production efficiency.
In addition, XPU now supports multiple GPUs in both hybrid and GPU-only modes, helping to maximize use of hardware resources when rendering on GPU farms.
However, it doesn’t ease the memory restrictions inherent in GPU rendering: all of the GPUs must be identical, and the scene being rendered must fit into the memory of each GPU.
Some limitations still remain when using XPU for final-frame rendering
And while XPU is now feature-complete enough for Pixar to say that it is “rapidly becoming a viable replacement for RIS” for final-quality output, it still has some limitations in RenderMan 27.
One is scenes with very large numbers of lights: below several hundred lights, XPU converges faster than RIS, but above several thousand, RIS remains the renderer of choice.
XPU also does not support light transport algorithms like bidirectional path tracing and photon mapping, so “very difficult” lighting scenarios like underwater caustics may also still require RIS.
Second, XPU does not support baking workflows, although baking in RIS and using the baked results in XPU “may” be a viable alternative.
Third, XPU still does not render some types of geometry, particularly NURBS and quadrics, although that’s unlikely to be a major issue for entertainment work.
In addition, XPU currently requires a NVIDIA GPU, so it’s available on Windows and Linux only.
Pixar plans to support Macs with Apple Silicon processors – all Macs released after 2023 – in a dot release, but there’s no indication of whether XPU will be supported, or only RIS.
Pipeline integration: support for VFX Reference Platform 2024 and updated bridge plugins
RenderMan 27 will also bring the software closer to the current VFX Reference Platform standard, although it supports last year’s CY2024 spec, not CY2025.
For pipeline integration, all of the bridge plugins for DCC software – Blender, Houdini, Katana and Maya – have been updated to support the new features in RenderMan 27.
The Texture Manager in the bridge plugins now defaults to OpenImageIO for mipmapped texture conversion, reducing processing times, and replacing Pixar’s .tx format with the more standard OpenEXR.
Blender users also get support for Blender’s native light linking workflow, and a number of workflow improvements, including a UI button to stop and restart IPR renders.
Houdini users get extended support for the Solaris look development and layout toolset.
New version of the free Non-Commercial RenderMan edition
Non-Commercial RenderMan, the free edition of RenderMan for education, demo reels, and tools development is also being updated, and will include the latest version of RenderMan XPU.
Price, system requirements and release date
RenderMan 27 is compatible with Windows 10+, macOS 12.0+ and glibc 2.34+ Linux (equivalent to RHEL 9+). Integration plugins are available for Blender, Houdini, Katana and Maya.
RenderMan XPU is supported on Windows and Linux. It requires a NVIDIA Pascal GPU or newer.
New perpetual and node-locked floating licenses currently cost $845, up $250 since the release of RenderMan 26.3. There is also a free non-commercial edition.
RenderMan 27 is currently in beta. Pixar hasn’t announced a final release date.
Read a full list of new features in the RenderMan 27 beta in the online release notes
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