Release Notes - 103

103.5.1

RTX - Common

Improvements

  • Added “Points default width” to Render Settings/Common/Geometry as fallback if no width is specified in UsdGeomPoints.

Known issues

  • Closing the application while a material is loading may hang the application.

RTX - Real-Time

Known issues

  • SSS sometimes has bright sparkles.

  • Dark bands are visible on sky mesh when both “Global Volumetric Effects” and Translucency “Fractional Cutout Opacity” are enabled.

  • Textures are not supported in Rect Lights unless Sampled Direct Lighting is enabled.

RTX - Interactive (Path Tracing)

Bug fixes

  • Fixed “If Total Samples per Pixel is set to 0 (infinite), the elapsed time in the HUD stats is not updated.”

Known issues

  • Some AOVs cannot be enabled in the Render Settings.

103.5.0

RTX - Common

Improvements

  • Changed default slider range for FFT bloom scale to be more practical

Bug fixes

  • Fixed “Geometries with time-varying primvars can crash”

  • Fixed “Incorrect computation of the max theoratical mip count”. Previously, textures could appear slightly lower resolution than intended if Texture Max Resolution was lower.

  • Fixed “Crash after changing Texture Streaming Memory Budget on Vulkan”

  • Fixed “Section tool: masked-part looks dark instead of invisible”

  • Fixed “Scene reload is required to see updated camera clipping value”

  • Fixed “Sometimes the render settings are lost during a Save As”

Known issues

  • Closing the application while a material is loading may hang the application.

RTX - Real-Time

Bug fixes

  • Fixed “Scaled Curve Primitives lead to incorrect rendering”

  • Fixed “With Eco Mode turned on, changing Focus Distance or F-Stop does not update the view”

Known issues

  • SSS sometimes has bright sparkles.

  • Dark bands are visible on sky mesh when both “Global Volumetric Effects” and Translucency “Fractional Cutout Opacity” are enabled.

  • Textures are not supported in Rect Lights unless Sampled Direct Lighting is enabled.

RTX - Interactive (Path Tracing)

Bug fixes

  • Fixed “When using UsdPreviewSurface, cutout parts sometimes appear black.”

  • Fixed “Scaled Curve Primitives lead to incorrect rendering.”

Known issues

  • Some AOVs cannot be enabled in the Render Settings.

RTX - Accurate (Iray)

Bug fixes

  • Fixed “Animated materials look incorrect”

  • Fixed “Crash can occur when reading string settings.”

  • Fixed “Artifacts with normal map rendering while texture compression is set to Medium.”

103.1.2

RTX - Common

Improvements

  • Subdivision Global Refinment now has a slider, with a minimum value of 0

Bug fixes

  • Fixed crashes when opening intel Sponza scene

  • Fixed “Unnecessary constant array primvar corrupt warning RTX Hydra”

  • Fixed “Sky doesn’t look correct on first add or reload due to texture streaming”

  • Fixed “Hang or long time spent computing tangents for a mesh”

  • Fixed “Primary Ray Visibility on Area Lights under nested transforms is inconsistently applied when reopening scene”

  • Fixed “AOVs cause memory leak”

  • Fixed “Matte objects can result in memory leak”

  • Fixed “‘Visible in primary ray’ setting shows as False by default for DomeLight, but is actually enabled. Should show as True.”

  • Fixed “Linux / Vulkan GPU Memory usage regression”

Known issues

  • Closing the application while a material is loading may hang the application.

RTX - Real-Time

Bug fixes

  • Fixed “Rect Lights shadows can sometimes lower performance significantly”

  • Fixed “Crash when enabling ‘Visible in Primary Ray’ on a sphere light and enabling caustics”

  • Fixed “Even if OmniSurface specular weight is 0, the material appears reflective.”

  • Fixed “Matte Object rendering has aliased edge”

Known issues

  • SSS sometimes has bright sparkles.

RTX - Interactive (Path Tracing)

Bug fixes

  • Fixed “Path Tracing: EXR used in a rectangle light is not visible in reflections”

  • Fixed “Colorful glitch when viewing backface of matte objects”

RTX - Accurate (Iray)

Bug fixes

  • Fixed “When Area lights are not visible in primary rays, they block light from other lights.”

  • Fixed “Volumetric fog units in Iray are treated differently than ‘RTX Real-Time’ and ‘RTX Interactive’”

  • Fixed “Hangs when changing material graph”

  • Fixed “Render does not properly respect alpha cutouts”

103.1.1

RTX - Common

Improvements

  • Normal input of UsdPreviewSurface now reads normal maps as raw when set to auto instead of sRGB.

Bug fixes

  • Fix “Texture streaming bug; MDL floating point texture normal map not visible”

  • Fix “texture streaming bug for large HDR maps”

  • Fix “AOV memory leak when using matte object in real-time mode”

  • Fix “basisCurves with a normal vertex primvar are not rendered”

  • Fix “Attic scene has bright flashes in RTX Real-Time if loaded after loading some other scenes”

  • Fix “The deletion of a material used by geomsubset causes a crash”

  • Various stability fixes

Known issues

  • Sky templates’ textures sometimes don’t load fully, must click on its material for it to refresh or disable texture streaming

RTX - Real-Time

Improvements

  • Render settings display names for SSS improved for clarity and added tooltips

RTX - Interactive (Path Tracing)

Bug fixes

  • Fixed “EXR map used in Rect Light produces no lighting”

103.1.0

RTX - Common

Improvements

  • UsdGeomCurve and UsdGeomPoint support

  • General PrimVar support, including accessing PrimVars in MDL

  • Improved matte object support (matte shadows & reflections)

  • Added support for texture cache from servers

  • Support grey+alpha textures

  • Support GPU mesh vertex position updates

  • Various texture streaming bug fixes

  • Use UDIM tile counts instead of width/height in warning messages about Mari-style UDIMs

  • Use domelight color when texture is not set

  • Handle non-watertight nested volumes

  • Optix denoiser multiview support

  • Return viewZ as depth for synthetic data

  • Support for ‘use back material’ Vray2Sided

  • Add support for compute-only ReShade effects

  • Added controls for custom irradiance range and display value under mouse pointer

  • Support Camera Lens Models in Picking and Selection Outline passes

  • Enable exposure clamping by default

  • Various optimizations for material parameter authoring

Bug fixes

  • Fix picking shader crash

  • Respect SRGB flag for DDS textures and Typeless DDS Formats

  • Fixed .exr movie capture crash

  • Fix GPU profiler recording regressions, saving to json python, and docs for nsight

  • Fix VRay texture conversion crop/clip bug

  • Fix handling of sbsar archives in MDL entity resolver

  • Fixing incorrect tonemapper modes: reinhardModifiedToneMap (missing division term) and HejiHableAlu (missing power)

  • Fix startup crash in GPU profiler

  • Fix several issues with DomeLightData texture uploads

  • Fix picking and selection for wireframe

  • Fixed rendering artifacts in animated meshes with geom subsets

RTX - Real-Time

Improvements

  • Real-time SSS is now supported as experimental feature and configurable

  • Native polynomial fisheye projection

  • Auto-enable + auto-config real-time MGPU

  • Disable dome light in reflection by default and add an option for Sampled lighting

Bug fixes

  • Fix GI on Debug White material

  • Add dome light diffuse contribution back in translucent pass for fractional opacity objects

  • Fix DLSS not available on MGPU fallback case

  • Fixed dome light appearance when translucency is disabled

RTX - Interactive (Path Tracing)

Improvements

  • Light Linking support added

  • AOV support via USD RenderProduct & RenderVar prims, including in Movie Recorder

  • Improved performance for volumes

  • Improved support for sampling of thousands of lights

  • Support for alpha in textured rect lights

2021.3.0

RTX - Common

Improvements

  • AutoExposure now works as expected

  • Fixed issues with handling of metersPerUnit=1 in volume parameters

  • Fixed a bug in how we dealt with the V texture coordinate flipping, which resulted in normal mapping not matching Iray and other issues. The material templates we provide have been updated to preserve the original look for normal maps, but they will now match across renderers meeting the MDL spec.

  • Disable legacy MDL-in-USD schema by default, behind a setting

  • MDL templates we provide, such as OmniPBR, OmniGlass or UsdPreviewSurface now use a new parameter called ‘enable_opacity’, which the RTX renderer can recognize to determined whether cutout_opacity can have values different from 1.0. This is a convention that we rely on to better optimize for this case without duplicating shader code for materials

  • The UE4 material template will now set material.geometry.normal when clear coat is not used. This matches better how the real-time mode currently expects to find normal mapped normal values.

  • Improved code generation from MDL materials to generate less code and compile faster

  • Material Texture parameters stored in USD (as oppose to MDL files) are now correctly accounted for by the progress bar and the path-traced mode (resulting in rendering accumulation resetting as these texture load)

  • Added two new options to reduced GPU memory usage for textures: one (enabled by default) is to use texture block compression at load time, which can reduce texture memory usage to 1/4 of the original. The other option is a user-controllable setting to set a cap on the size of the texture mip levels to keep after mipmap generation.

  • Improved interactivity by decoupling UI/Main loop and Viewport rendering loops, combined with other tweaks to provide the UI rendering more opportunities to run its workload on the GPU as frequently as needed.

  • We can now handle many more skeletal mesh prims without requiring a command line option to increase descriptor set reservation

  • Light and audio gizmos are now rendered as sprites instead of USD prims

  • Selection outline now does not use rasterization, instead using ray tracing to handle large amounts of geometry as efficiently as the renderer

  • Fixed a bug that resulted in Multi-GPU consuming more GPU memory than it should have

  • Startup time reduction by compiling global shaders in parallel

  • Render Settings UI has been rewritten with new UI framework and cleaned up to be simpler and clearer

  • Some Render Settings defaults have changed: DLSS is now enabled by default in Quality mode, Sampled lighting is automatically enabled in scenes with more than a set number of lights (default is 10).

Known issues

  • Rect Light textures only work in Path-Traced mode and with the Sampled Lighting enabled in real-time mode

  • To load USD stages with more than 256,000 instances add this option to your command line: –/rtx/sceneDb/maxInstances=numberOfInstances

RTX - Real-Time

Improvements

  • Sampled Lighting mode has improved handling of translucent geometry

  • Fixed bugs with many-light sampling and multi-GPU

  • Reflections now support indirect diffuse GI

  • Indirect diffuse GI works better and faster than before

  • Improvements for DLSS:

    • Updated to a new version of DLSS

    • Fixed bug with some post processing passes not being aware of DLSS, resulting in incorrect results

    • Fixed texture LOD bias to meet the DLSS requirements

    • Fixed DOF flicker artifacts,

    • Fixed reflections to be sharp where they should be sharp

  • Fixed bugs in multi-GPU that resulted in incorrect blending across the large tiles

  • Fixed crashes with Sampled Lighting mode in multi-GPU mode

Known issues

  • Rect Light textures only work in Real-Time if Sampled Lighting is enabled