How Good is V-Ray RT GPU 3.5?

Does it bring a full-blown production rendering engine with faster rendering or just a small list of improvements?

Tomasz Wyszołmirski from Dabarti has published a detailed review of the new V-Ray RT GPU 3.5. He presented a look at the newest features and improvements and summed up pros and cons of the latest version. The review is mostly focused the GPU side of the engine showing that V-Ray RT GPU 3.5 is a full-blown production rendering engine that bring faster rendering rather that just a small addition.

A reviewer breaks down multiple aspects of the new version. For example, he presented his view on a new feature called Adaptive Lights.

First time I’ve got familiar with the concept of better multi-light rendering back in July 2016. At the time I was pointing out poor performance of many lights rendering and I got promised that it will get faster. Adaptive Lights took few months to develop and from what I know it’s quite innovative approach that yields very good results. I’m super happy about that feature as V-Ray RT 3.4 wasn’t effective with many lights and this improvement helps a lot. It did turn out better than expected as it not only made rendering faster for RT GPU, but also for V-Ray CPU Adv.

Pros:

Speed improvement is very big. In some cases it render times dropped from 1 hour to few minutes. If you like data, here are my tests with some notes: Google Sheets.
Lighting looks more accurate.
Render elements like “Lighting” or “Global Illumination” look a bit different now, but much closer to what Adv is outputting.
Works with both Brute Force and Light Cache as secondary GI engine.
It looks very cool with BF+BF when it optimizes the settings and switches to Adaptive Lights:

Cons:

This doesn’t affect the VRayLightMtl which is still a bit sluggish. It’s better to use mesh lights instead.

Usage:

Based on my tests so far it always performs better with Adaptive Lights turned on. It’s also turned on by default so there is no reason to switch it on when you use “fresh” settings.
In case you need to change it for some reason. In 3ds Max you can use it from Production Renderer settings under Global Switches rollout. You may to change settings type “Advanced” or “Expert” if it’s invisible.

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Then he breaks down other major features to conclude with a fact that V-Ray RT GPU 3.5 still needs lots of features and improvements. In fact, he names at least eight of them:

V-Ray Volume Grid and Environment Fog support with efficient rendering.
Glossy Fresnel and Translucency support for VRayMtl.
Better displacement. In CPU Adv there is very nice feature that enhances the look of low resolution displacement using bump. We need that in RT GPU too.
Support for VRayScannedMtl.
VRayDistanceTex and VRayCurvature support.
Ability to use procedural noises and maps that are currently supported in other other software packages and RT.
Better way of telling which GPU or GPUs are used by the given 3ds Max instance, preferably accessed through Maxscript and stored with 3ds Max file instead of global System Environment Variables.
Active Shade to use “Dynamic” geometry type by default for better user feedback.

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V-Ray RT GPU 3.5 seems to be a major upgrade to the last of version of the solution. It is still not out of beta, so we’ll definitely keep an eye on the final version. In the meantime, make sure to check out the full review here.

How Good is V-Ray RT GPU 3.5?

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