Blender 3.0's Cycles X Rendering Performance Is Looking Great

A status update on Blender's "Cycles X" project was published today ahead of the upcoming Blender 3.0 release and with already some feature additions planned for Blender 3.1.

As we have come to expect, Cycles X with Blender 3.0 will yield big performance improvements over Blender 2.93 when running on NVIDIA GPUs with their proprietary stack. NVIDIA GPU support with Blender remains the best option for the moment and is enjoying significant uplift with the Blender 3.0 code.

The Blender 3.0 NVIDIA performance relative to the current stable release, as reported by Blender.org.

As noted recently, Blender 3.0 will have AMD HIP support too for a better option than the since-removed OpenCL acceleration path previously used by AMD GPUs with Blender. Unfortunately, that AMD HIP Blender support for Linux is not going to be enabled until the Blender 3.1 follow-on release.

Cycles X has also seen work recently on hair and shadow improvements, ambient occlusion enhancements, denoising improvements, and more. In addition to Blender 3.1 expected to have AMD HIP support on Linux, that release should also be adding an Apple Metal back-end for use on macOS. Other feature work for Blender 3.1 next year is also expected.

More details in today's Cycles X status update.