The list of features in the latest version of NVidia’s renderer is now available. Keep in mind not all of them may have been exposed in Max 2013. New features include:
– Ptex support – per-face texture mapping system support.
– Iray 2.0 – provides numerous improvements in performance and quality, like native support for BSDF layering in the rendering core. This version is using the latest release of CUDA, thus it is supporting, and will actually take benefit from, most recent GPU hardware.
– Improved hair ray tracing performance – optimized performance and lower memory consumption. The improvement is especially noticeable when computing shadows and detail shadow maps. Image quality is increased at the same time by raising the intersection precision.
– Detail shadow map features – the quality of detail shadow maps has been improved. The data size of high-depth detail shadow maps has been reduced.
– Unified sampling features – support for unified sampling in Mental Ray and in shaders has been extended. The min/max sampling limits can now be specified per object.
– OpenEXR stereo support – the OpenEXR Multiview extension is now supported and used to create stereoscopic (“sxr”) image files.
– Texture caching features – improved control of texture caching as well as reporting of cache performance and statistics.
– Subdivision mesh features – the ccmesh subdivision mesh geometry now supports approximation with the sharp property, to achieve faceted rendering look. In addition, per-face user data can now be attached to a ccmesh object.
– Initial Alembic support – the Alembic open source interchange framework and file format is supported in an initial form. A new shader abcimport is provided to read static or animated geometry like polygon or subdivision meshes and NURBS surfaces from Alembic files, including support for loading them on demand only during rendering.
– New IBL shader package – the new shader package useribl comes with Mental Ray. It supports convenient workflows for lighting from environment maps or from textured area lights similar to the built-in IBL functionality, this time provided as separate shader nodes with extended functionality.
– New subsurface shaders – improved subsurface scattering shaders misss_fast_shader2(_x) have been added with extended features towards production purposes.
More at Autodesk.
