After much teasing and anticipation, Pixar has finally launched the newest version of its 3D rendering software for VFX and animation, described as the "most significant release in over a decade".
With this release, RenderMan XPU, a hybrid CPU-GPU rendering engine, is officially ready for final frame rendering. RIS is still available but is transitioning to maintenance mode, and Pixar encourages studios to start migrating to XPU, as future updates will focus on enhancing XPU performance and features.
Key XPU updates include interactive denoising, deep OpenEXR workflows, extended compositing capabilities, and improved stylized rendering. Also, multi-GPU rendering is now available, offering major performance improvements. Cryptomatte support will arrive in a dot release.
