106.0

Release Highlights

In this release, significant improvements have been made for material and lighting rendering fidelity with the RTX Real-Time mode, narrowing the fidelity gap with the reference RTX Interactive (Path Tracing) mode. By achieving higher fidelity, users can expect more realistic and visually appealing results in their real-time rendering workflows.

Increased visual quality with improved material and lighting rendering fidelity in real-time translates into benefits such as enhanced realism, whether it’s to review automotive designs with complex materials or lighting conditions during factory design planning, the refined fidelity ensures that the final output closely aligns with the intended vision. Additionally, by bridging the gap with the reference Path Tracing mode, users can achieve this heightened quality without sacrificing real-time performance. This efficiency boost allows professionals to iterate faster, make informed design decisions, and ultimately deliver more compelling and accurate visual content. As a result, the RTX Real-Time mode becomes an even more valuable tool for designers, developers, and artists across various industries.

Here are some of the key changes made for this release:

  • Added support for MDL materials with measured BSDFs based on measurement of real-world surfaces, such as X-Rite’s AxF (Appearance Exchange Format) materials converted to MDL, including for the RTX Interactive (Path Tracing) mode. See the MDL SDK API documentation for a sample on how to convert an X-Rite AxF file to an MDL material, which can then be imported into Omniverse: https://raytracing-docs.nvidia.com/mdl/api/mi_neuray_example_axf_to_mdl.html

  • Reduced undesired image noise and smearing in sequences by updating to a new version of DLSS Ray Reconstruction and enabled it by default. DLSS Ray Reconstruction enhances image quality for ray-traced scenes with an Nvidia supercomputer-trained AI network that generates higher-quality pixels in between sampled rays.

  • Improved material rendering fidelity with MDL material distilling and enabled it by default, which further reduces the gap with RTX Interactive when rendering materials of arbitrary complexity, particularly common with materials found in automotive rendering.

  • Improved light transport simulation fidelity by enabling Sampled Direct Lighting by default, reducing the gap with RTX Interactive.

  • Added Depth of Field support for Fisheye Lens, which was undefined for RTX Real-Time, further reducing the feature gap with RTX Interactive.

_images/mdl_measured_material.png

Added

  • RTX: Added support for measured materials in MDL (for example, AxF materials converted to MDL).

  • RTX: Added a carb setting named /rtx/raytracing/fp16RadianceScaleFactor to find the linear scale factor used in storing radiance in HDR.

  • RTX: Added setting /rtx/material/translucencyAsOpacity which when enabled results in translucency being rendered as opacity blending surface instead of being refractive.

  • RTX: Added support to mesh-light sampling detection logic for OmniSurface and OmniPBR emission color image.

  • RTX Real-Time: Integrated new version of DLSS Ray Reconstruction.

  • RTX Real-Time: Enabled MDL Material Distilling by default, and made various improvements which bring material fidelity closer to RTX Interactive.

  • RTX Real-Time: Enable Sampled Direct Lighting mode by default.

  • RTX Real-Time: Depth of Field is now supported for Fisheye Lens. Previously, support was undefined.

  • RTX Real-Time: Enabled Motion Vector Correction by default.

Improved

  • RTX Real-Time: Changed Eco Mode’s default frame count to 500.

  • RTX Real-Time: Optimized Eco Mode further to stop evaluating Sampled Feedback.

  • RTX Real-Time: Optimized Eco Mode further by avoiding running DLSS-G while Eco Mode kicked in.

  • RTX Real-Time: Removed support of former Anti-Aliasing features, now implicitly uses DLSS or DLAA.

  • RTX Interactive: Improved quality of alpha output to lessen aliasing.

  • RTX Interactive: Improved multi-GPU automatic load-balancing performance for homogeneous and heterogeneous GPU configurations.

Fixed

  • RTX: Fixed that in some cases, deleting a material resulted in the material still being rendered on the assigned instance.

  • RTX: Fixed regression which broke Object Space usage in MDL materials.

  • RTX: Fixed an issue where when an object stopped moving it would jump to the wrong position if far from the origin.

  • RTX: Fixed an issue where the Bloom Post-Process would wrap around the edges of the view.

  • RTX: Fixed an issue where light visible to primary ray was still affected by the Invisible Light Roughness Threshold.

  • RTX: Fixed issue where primvar holeIndices used to ignore faces in mesh geometry was not being respected by the renderer if meshes were already made of triangles.

  • RTX: Fixed issue where vertices on a skinned curves appeared offsetted

  • RTX: Fixed an issue where RTXSensor was erroneously normalizing the velocity vector of hit points when projecting from world space to sensor space.

  • RTX: Fixed issue where protoinstances were not properly syncing when unhidden.

  • RTX: Fixed various crashes.

  • RTX Real-Time: Fixed a regression where in some cases, the shadow terminator on materials with subsurface scattering had a noisy artefact.

  • RTX Real-Time: Fixed issue where translucency pass background brightness looked clipped.

  • RTX Real-Time: Fixed issued where smearing artifacts appeared after the Eco Mode kicked in if global volumetrics was enabled.

  • RTX Real-Time: Fixed an issue where, with MDL material distilling enabled, backside materials were not rendered.

  • RTX Real-Time: Area lights culled out by invisLightRoughnessThreshold no longer occlude dome/distant light glossy contribution.

  • RTX Real-Time: Let the bsdf sample ray continue if the light hit is excluded due to Light Linking, otherwise this resulted in lights appearing in the reflection even if excluded.

  • RTX Interactive: Fixed that a holdout object would appear as opaque in captured images’ alpha channel.

  • RTX Interactive: Fixed case where translucent materials could appear blurry depending on the camera clipping distance.

  • RTX Interactive: Fixed that when sampling a RectLight, the alpha of the texture was not taken into account. As a result, surfaces with non-zero roughness were getting contributions from RectLight areas that were masked by zero alpha.

  • RTX Interactive: Fixed an issue where if Caching was enabled, a surface behind a translucent material might appear significantly darkened.

  • RTX Interactive: Fixed regression which caused Multimatte to no longer work.

  • RTX Interactive: Fixed an issue where stripes would occasionally appear when rendering with multiple GPUs enabled.

  • RTX Interactive: Fixed regression which caused accumulation to reset when toggling the Optix Denoiser setting on or off.

  • RTX Interactive: Exposure is now consistent with RTX Real-Time.

Known issues

  • RTX Real-Time: Hair might render much darker than it should, or appear desatured.

  • RTX Interactive: UI responsiveness can lag when rendering complex volumes.

  • RTX Interactive: On some occasions, the viewport flickers if Fill Viewport is enabled. Disabling Optix Denoiser, or disabling Fill Viewport, can avoid the issue.