Add new "Linear 3D Curves" option in the Curves panel in the render
properties. This renders curves as linear segments rather than smooth
curves, for faster render time at the cost of accuracy.
On NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs, this can give a 6x speedup compared to smooth
curves, due to hardware acceleration. On NVIDIA Ada there is still
a 3x speedup, and CPU and other GPU backends will also render this
faster.
A difference with smooth curves is that these have end caps, as this
was simpler to implement and they are usually helpful anyway.
In the future this functionality will also be used to properly support
the CURVE_TYPE_POLY on the new curves object.
Pull Request: https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/139735
This fixes issues when using Embree on mutliple GPUs.
A previous workaround used separate contexts, this one now
lets us keep a single context for all GPUs.
Pull Request: https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/143089
Currently MetalRT renders always use extended limits, which is needed to correctly render scenes where the max primitive count can exceed 2^28 or the instance count can exceed 2^24. This patch adopts Metal best practices of only enabling this flag if it is needed.
This PR is similar to #133364, but there are some notable differences:
1) The old PR made an overly optimistic assumption that all the relevant visibility bits could be squeezed into 8 bits. This new PR adopts the same approach that Optix takes of using 8 bits as a primary HW filter, and checking the full 32 bit mask inside the SW intersection handler.
~~2) I moved the scene scanning check from Scene into MetalDevice. This avoids platform specific details leaking into platform agnostic areas.~~
~~3) In live viewport mode, we always use extended limits in case we tip over the threshold.~~
_EDIT:_
2) The limits are scanned in `Scene::update_kernel_features`, and given to the device by a new `set_bvh_limits` method which returns true if the BVH and kernels need to be reloaded.
Pull Request: https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/142401
This improves the existing scene specialisation mechanism by replacing "kernel_data.kernel_features" with a function constant. It doesn't cause any additional compilation requests, but allows the backend compiler to eliminate more dead code. An additional compiler hint is provided for dead-stripping "volume_stack_enter_exit" which results in slightly faster rendering of non-volumetric scenes.
Pull Request: https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/142235
These changes introduce modifications to the SYCL queue creation
in OneapiDevice::create_queue. In case several DPC++ devices are
detected by Blender and exposed through it, we are now creating
a new SYCL context for each device, which allows us to prevent
execution failures due to some known issues in the DPC++ runtime
regarding multi GPU support. As this would have some small
performance impact, few percents, it is only applied to
multi GPU configurations, while the behavior for a single
GPU configuration remains the same.
Pull Request: https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/141834
On systems with multiple Intel GPUs with a mix of recent and old
unsupported drivers (such as 101.3302), the Level-Zero stack may have
troubles initializing, leading to a crash while enumerating devices.
Luckily this condition actually leads to an exception we can catch,
as implemented here in this commit.
Pull Request: https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/141674
All GPU backends now support NanoVDB, using our own kernel side code
that is easily portable. This simplifies kernel and device code.
Volume bounds are now built from the NanoVDB grid instead of OpenVDB,
to avoid having to keep around the OpenVDB grid after loading.
While this reduces memory usage, it does have a performance impact,
particularly for the Cubic filter. That will be addressed by
another commit.
Pull Request: https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/132908
This PR is a more extensive follow on from #123551 (removal of AMD and Intel GPU support).
All supported Apple GPUs have Metal 3 and tier 2 argument buffer support. The invariant resource properties `gpuAddress` and `gpuResourceID` can be written directly into GPU structs once at setup time rather than once per dispatch. More background info can be found in [this article](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/metal/improving-cpu-performance-by-using-argument-buffers?language=objc).
Code changes:
- All code relating to `MTLArgumentEncoder` is removed
- `KernelParamsMetal` updates are directly written into `id<MTLBuffer> launch_params_buffer` which is used for the "static" dispatch arguments
- Dynamic dispatch arguments are small enough to be encoded using the `MTLComputeCommandEncoder.setBytes` function, eliminating the need for cycling temporary arg buffers
Pull Request: https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/140671
When running Blender with `--debug-cycles` and the right
verbosity level, Cycles can output "GPU Queue Stats" to the terminal
at the end of rendering detailing how much time was spent in each kernel.
The Metal GPU backend did not support this specific way of gathering the
information. This commit fixes that by implementing support to the Metal
GPU backend.
Note: This kind of information could already be gathered for the Metal
GPU backend using the `CYCLES_METAL_PROFILING` environment variable,
and this is still the recommended way of gathering that information for
Metal. This change is just to add some consistency between platforms.
Pull Request: https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/137592
TLAS wasn't being refreshed when empty.
This PR removes a spurious early-exit during BVH build that was preventing
the TLAS from being recreated when it was empty.
Pull Request: https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/141215
The distributed memory access toggle in Cycles preferences would show up
when a user has two GPUs that can access each other's memory, but only one
of them is supported by Cycles.
For example the AMD RX 5700XT and AMD Vega 64 can access each other's
memory, but only the 5700XT is supported by Cycles.
Pull Request: https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/140521
The performance of the sorted_paths_array kernel on B570 is problematic.
Relying on local sorting+partitioning instead gives a 25% overall rendering
speedup and no regression in shade_surface when rendering Agent 327 Barbershop scene.
On Arc A770, it still gives a 2% speedup when rendering Barbershop.
Pull Request: https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/140308
Device::const_copy_to is sometimes called when the Embree BVH has been freed
and not replaced yet. Previously this was a simpler pointer copy, now there is
a function call. Make sure it's just a function copy.
Thanks to Nikita Sirgienko for figuring this out.
Pull Request: https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/140457
