Redshift3D - first fully GPU-accelerated biased renderer

Looks like noone posted news about this new render engine over here…

Some PR talk from devs mouth (taken from Softimage mailing list)

Today, we’re very excited to announce the official launch of Redshift v0.1 alpha, to our knowledge, the world’s first fully GPU-accelerated biased renderer.

Redshift supports multiple GI solutions: Brute-Force GI, Irradiance Caching (aka Final Gather), Irradiance Point Cloud (aka Light Cache) and Photon Mapping (GI and Caustics).
All are fully GPU-accelerated and perform many times faster than similar CPU-based offerings.

A problem that plagues many GPU renderers on the market is that they are limited by the available VRAM on the graphics card (and most systems have significantly less VRAM than main memory). Redshift addresses this by using an out-of-core architecture for geometry and textures allowing you to render scenes with tens of millions of polygons and gigabytes of textures with off-the-shelf, inexpensive hardware.

Redshift currently integrates directly with Softimage 2011 through 2013 and Maya 2011 through 2013 on Windows XP or higher. 3ds Max support is in development. To run Redshift, you’ll need an NVidia graphics card supporting compute 1.2 or higher with 1GB VRAM or more.

You can check out our website http://www.redshift3d.com for more info.

Introduction and feature summary page: http://www.redshift3d.com/products/redshift
Documentation: http://docs.redshift3d.com/Default.html

Some renders with rendertimes written under (taken from here http://forums.cgsociety.org/showpost.php?p=7542709&postcount=9)


GTX 470: 35 seconds
GTX 670: 27 seconds
GTX Titan: 17 seconds


GTX 470: 75 seconds
GTX 670: 65 seconds
GTX Titan: 39 seconds


GTX 470: 155 seconds
GTX 670: 123 seconds
GTX Titan: 77 seconds

Seems quite speedy for a noise-free renders…also Blender was mentioned as potential candidate for plugin if there’s enough interest.

Once 3DSMax support is online we’ll look to all other DCCs. If we get enough interest for Cinema4D, Sketchup, Lightwave, Blender or any other DCC we’ll obviously do it! We are also working on an API so that 3rd parties can help us out with creating plugins for other DCCs.

One more render with times (again taken from Softimage mailing list)


GTX 470: 129 seconds
GTX 670: 96 seconds
GTX Titan: 49 seconds

And video with Redshift3D in action, Softimage version.

really interesting! Where can we express our interest in a blender plugin? :smiley:

Well obviously there’s contact page on their site http://www.redshift3d.com/contact

looks like bidirectional path tracer with irradiance cache “cheat”

How about multi-GPU support?

Certainly looks interesting. They boast an out-of-core architecture, but I haven’t seen any scene that would require it. I wonder what level of performance they achieve with it (and whether it’s really that much better than CPU at that point).

looks like bidirectional path tracer with irradiance cache “cheat”

It’s likely just a single-bounce stochastic raytracer, why bother with bidir when you also have photon mapping?
This solution will however have the same kind of problems you get from other “biased” renderers like vray.

EDIT: removed comment on material system

It looks like they do everything right :wink:

Kind regards
Alain

Looks pretty nice. It would be awesome to have this as a plugin for Blender :slight_smile:

I contacted them and asked about integration in blender and multi-GPU support, here is the answer:

"We don’t currently have any solid plans for a blender version, but we’ve had several requests now so it could happen.Or perhaps once our API is ready, someone from the “community” could implement the Blender integration for us which would be nice since we’re a small team and we have our hands full already (as you can imagine).

In terms of multiple GPU support, Redshift currently only utilizes a single GPU, but support for multiple GPUs is coming."

To run Redshift, you’ll need an NVidia graphics card

Let me guess, no OpenCL support.

Not currently but it is planned for a future release.

:frowning: I have amd

They did send me the same answer :wink:
Everyone should ask them to make pressure :slight_smile:

But let’s wait until the API is ready, I hope we don’t have to wait as long as we did for the Octance-Intergration (Licenceproblems).

Kind regards
Alain

quite nice timing with py-nodes. to have it integrated and using node materials. they got some nice looking SSS also, although the examples are very basic.

it seems, I can be wrong on this, but that cycles, redshift and octane renders looks so similar in glossy, diffuse and glass. and all works only on nvidia with cuda so far. That they all might be based from same nvidia papers to get going.

for me i find it hard to replace cycles at the moment its to good. and works in linux. and is fast on GPU. just lacks some stuf thats being adressed now by brecht. but always good to know others are taking the same path as cycles.

in a perfect world there would be a GPU render consortium, i think cycles->redshift could learn a lot from each other since the approach are so similar. if they where more open source oriented, they could help out brecht with papers and ideas how to implement SSS on the gpu.

I don’t see any really worthwhile caustic presentations…??? I think cycles is still better for my uses…even though it is a stinker when it comes to caustics…those I do for personal pleasure anyway :wink:

Their speed is impressive I must confess - I also like the fact that they have different GI modes!

I have been testing Redshift for a while now and I think it is by far the fastest path tracer out there. In some scenes it is an order of magnitude faster than Cycles.

I’ve been testing Redshift since the alpha and I have to say that the is the fastest renderer I’ve used. It has been released now, for 500$ per marchine (as many GPUs as you want).

I’d love to see it integrated in Blender, I know that the developpers are willing to release it for as many DCC as possible, but they have limited ressources and it came to their mind to maybe outsource that part. If anyone’s interested into creating a plugin for Blender, then get in touch with the guys from Redshift, they are reactive and really nice :wink:

Been trying this out in maya, and holy wow is it fast!!

Here’s some test renders ive done (at 50% of 1920x1080 (940x540))


above: testing out the redshift ‘create sun and sky’ . on the right is a car material, left is a lambert.


above: spot lamp and a car material. Nice indirect reflection/diffusion.


above: testing out the SSS.

above: more SSS

above: HDRI I took

below is the same but rendered in cycles for comparison* note brighter exposure due to just different file settings

So, render times?

They varied between 2 seconds and 4 seconds for redshift.

Yes you heard me, 2 to 4 seconds.

The SSS was probably closer to the 4 second mark