Clarisse iFX 4.0 SP2 out now with an RTX accelerated 3D viewport

Isotropix has released a new version of Clarisse iFX, its 3D scene assembly application and production renderer. Version 4.0 SP2 adds the ability to use interactive NVIDIA RTX ray tracing in the 3D viewport to speed up the manipulation and display of production scenes. According to Isotropix, this means that artists can now “create, interact and display production scenes made of hundreds of billions of polygons in real-time at speeds often 50-100X faster than the prior CPU-based viewport.”

It’s important to note that this is the viewport display, not the production renderer which according to Isotropix cannot currently be ported to GPU without losing several critical features. Isotropix go on to explain  it is “working with NVIDIA to support volumes, render-time displacements, direct ray tracing of Catmull Clark implicit surfaces without tessellation and time instance in scatterers to future updates of hardware-accelerated 3D View in the future.”

Also in this release are many improvements to its multiple importance sampling to improves the quality of final rendering. Compared to previous versions, “the new sampling strategies, introduced in 4.0 SP2, resolve faster and produce less visual noise for the same number of samples. “

GPU acceleration currently works on cards with NVIDIA Turing, Volta, Pascal, or Maxwell architecture. Without this hardware It is still possible to force the viewport to use the GPU, in which case it will display what it can.

Find out more on Isotropix’s website.