Blender Releases an Overview of Its Cycles X Renderer

"The rendering improvements from the Cycles X project will be in the upcoming Blender 3.0 release. Since the announcement, developers have been working to complete and stabilize the code, as well as add new features and improve performance," comments the Blender team.

Here's a list of improvements:

• GPU Performance: GPU rendering performance has been further improved. Here's a comparison of render time on an NVIDIA Quadro RTX A6000 with OptiX between the new and the older versions:

• Hair and Shadow Improvements: A few benchmark scenes involving many layers of transparent hair were showing performance regressions compared to 2.93. This was fixed by making the algorithm estimate the number of samples to render in one batch smarter and changing the shadow kernel scheduling.

• Micro-Jittering: Sobol & Progressive Multi-Jitter can now use distance scrambling (or micro-jittering) to improve GPU rendering performance by increasing the correlation between pixels.
• Ambient Occlusion: Ambient Occlusion did not take into account transparency in the initial version of Cycles X. The team has now restored this, taking advantage of the shadow kernel improvements that also helped with hair. Also, additive AO support is now available through the Fast GI settings. 

• AMD HIP: Cycles X now supports GPU rendering on AMD as well as Nvidia GPUs. Current builds support GPU rendering on AMD hardware via the HIP (Heterogeneous-computing Interface for Portability) framework, which replaces Cycles’ OpenCL backend.