I can’t believe that it has been almost a month since my last post!
Truth to be told, I’ve been so insanely busy that I lost track of the time. The new developments of Reality have taken every moment of the day and when I came back to the surface… holy crap! Three weeks have passed!
My last post was about this astounding performance improvement in Lux 1.5. Since then, I answered several questions online and I’d like to recap them here:
- Q: Can I simply install LuxRender 1.5 and reap the benefit of the acceleration? A: nope, it’s not going to be that easy, we will have to wait for Reality 4.1.
- Q: Does this speed improvement requires a GPU? A: no, you will just need a moderately modern CPU.
- Q: Does this new feature work with all CPUs? A: Almost, you need to have a CPU that is SSSE3-capable or above. SSSE3 is the minimum, everything more modern will be icing on the cake. The more modern the CPU the bigger the speed improvement.
Now, just to give an idea of how monumental this development is, imagine that you have today a program that does something in X amount of time. To have an update that is twice as fast, in other words one that takes half the time to do the same thing, would be phenomenal. That kind of speed improvement is vary rare. But Reality 4.1 will not be just twice as fast. To have an update that makes your program three times faster, it’s simply amazing. But Reality 4.1 will not be just three times faster. To have an update that is four time faster, what it took an hour now takes just 15 minutes, it’s just unheard of. But Reality 4.1 will not be just four time faster.
I don’t have to continue, do I :)? The new speed improvement of Reality 4.1 will be simply fantastic. But I could not stop there. To make the next version better than ever we are going to have big changes. First of all, I have decided to help the LuxRender project a little bit. There are three versions of LuxRender, one for each of the major OSes: Mac OS, Windows and Linux. Building those versions takes time and the task was distributed among a group of dedicated volunteers. Unfortunately that was based on availability of time and it could lead to inconsistencies in the way builds were delivered. For example, as it is today, the Windows build includes samples scenes while the Mac OS does not.
So, I built a build lab where there are two machines dedicated to the task of automatically building LuxRender and to to push the builds nightly to the luxrender.net server. In this way people have access to timely builds, as the project evolves, and those builds happen automatically, without the need for people to dedicate their weekends or nights to baby-seat the build process. As I write this, the Mac OS and Windows builds are working. The Windows one is a 64-bit only and only with OpenCL. I hope to have a 64-bit, without OpenCL in a couple of days. The LuxRender web team will make a page available to download the nightly builds.
This leads to the next improvement for Reality: LuxRender will be integrated, shipped with the product, and you will not need to install it separately. I wanted to have this feature for a long time but it was needed to have the builds done in house to make it happen and now it is possible.
So, not only Reality 4.1 will be much faster, it will be the easiest Reality ever. There are other changes to discuss but this post is quite long already so I will write about them next week.
Happy rendering!
Ok, I’m hooked. Reel me in whenever you’re ready. 🙂
🙂
Life is wonderful when there are new places to explore. Time flows more rapidly when you are in the zone….and life is good when you can bring back treasure to share. I am very excited about your life’s work.
All this sound great, super-fantastic, whatever, but the problem is we already know them !… No offense, but all this are already old news. I do not want to seem ungrateful and/or arrogant, but we already know since your last post ‘Sneak Peek ‘ (from about 1 month ago !) that Reality 4.1 + LuxRender 1.5 combo will be up to 10x faster than the current version. What interests us (or what interest me, at least) is when the product will be finalized and released on the market ! As they say, we want deeds, not words ! Or ‘Acta, non verba’ in the language of your ancestors, the good old Latins ! 🙂
PS: this amazing speed improvement (up to 10x, as you keep promising) may seem unbelievable at first glance, but it only reflects the fact that the development team of LuxRender never up-graded/optimized LuxRender engine in terms of rendering speed, but instead keep adding new features and functionalities (which is not a bad thing per se). All this while all the other physically based rendering engines brought small incremental performance gains with each new version. So was reached the point when LuxRender became the slowest physically based rendering engine out there (a well known fact in the CGI/3D Graphics community). And the situation remained so for a very long time.
So, this performance improvement that you keep promise to us is nothing more than a welcome redeeming of an old handicap !
Hi.
Not everybody sees the same news at the same time so, sometimes, I repeat and expand on the subject. Regarding Lux, I dissent strongly with your analysis. The focus of LuxRender has been always to provide the highest amount of realism, the most of stringent, faithful simulation of physics. The idea is to be accurate first and to optimize later, and that is exactly what happened.
Hope this explains in more detail the “behind the scenes”. Cheers.
I just purchased Reality 4. When 4.1 comes out with all of the new improvements, am I going to have to repurchase or is this going to be a free update for R4 users?
Hi.
Thank you for your purchase. Reality 4.1 will be a free upgrade for all Reality 4 users.
Cheers.
Thank you so much 🙂
Thank you for all your hard work, I have really high expectation for reality 4.1.
If I got it right the hybrid mode uses both cpu and gpu but the latter use depends strictly on the cpu power. For example I have an intel i5 4670 and an ATI HD7850, in hybrid mode luxrender 1.4 uses gpu only at 20%.
My question is: if Luxrender 1.5 will make the CPU-Only render faster will it be able to take advantage of the GPU more in hybrid mode? Will there be improvements for the slg mode or will it be abandoned because of the lower compatibility?
Hi.
There will be good improvements in the GPU+CPU processing mode as well. I can’t share details at this point yet but we are working on it.
Cheers.
@wgsoup
Ah, a fellow advocate for SLG.
Quck question:
(Assuming you use Daz)
Have you noticed that in CPU mode the camera frame is rendered identical to DAZ, but in SLG mode the framing shifts dramatically, resulting in difficult postwork layering alignment, and an image that is zoomed WAY too far back — or is it just me?
Specifically, I’ve found it shifts from Camera.FrameWidth = 36.00 to Camera.FrameWidth = ~66.44.
This is my Daz Reality 2.5 experience; Daz Reality 4.0.x and I are still “working out” our differences, so I can’t test it yet. How is it matching up alignment-wise for you?
Don’t give up on us, Paolo!
I (we) hope you’re doing well out there!
Just wanted to let you know that I’m checking the blog every few days and just can’t wait to see what Reality 4.1 can do.
All of the CPU optimizations aside, I am still hoping that you will continue to support GPU and/or Hybrid mode, since I’ve got a lot invested in GPUs and let’s face it – GPU is where it’s at! 😉 (wink).
Looking forward to it, Paolo.
Best regards,
NE
I’m not giving up, quite the opposite 🙂
GPU processing is getting better and better. Hybrid is going to be retired, though, because we have better options now. I’ll let you know the details, when we have more information to share. The bottom-line is that there will be improvements on all fronts.
Thank you for the support, it’s very much appreciated.
Thank, *you*, Paolo.
I just started rendering 2 years ago, and although 3Delight is amazing, it was the Reality plug-in that captured my heart and made me fall in love with the art form, and has ever since helped me bring my visions to “Reality”.
Thanks, again.
NE
Please tell me how I can update. One time a pop-up appeared which said there was an update for Reality. I then clicked on “update later” or something similar, and the pop-up never appeared again. Now I don’t know how to update. Please help me.
Hi.
You simply download Reality from this site. Look in the Support menu. That’s all that you have to do 🙂
Cheers.
Thank you. Unfortunately I don’t know in which folder I should put the Reality props and lights now, but hopefully I’ll find out.