Luxion has announced a new era for their industry-leading KeyShot rendering program. For the first time KeyShot can now harness the full power of GPU-accelerated ray tracing through NVIDIA® RTX™ with NVIDIA OptiX™ technology.
Luxion’s Mission
As the first CPU-based real-time ray tracing software in the world, Luxion’s mission has always been about developing the fastest, easiest and more accurate visualization software in the industry. KeyShot’s ability to utilize multiple cores in CPUs has benefited 3D professionals for nearly a decade, producing stunning imagery on the back of Luxion’s internally-developed render engine and in-house expertise in advanced rendering technologies and graphics hardware.
With the latest version of Luxion, KeyShot utilizes NVIDIA RTX GPUs, but it does it in a way that enables visualization pros to have complete control over what powers their rendering workflow.
An example rendering image from the latest KeyShot from Luxion with new NVIDIA RTX with OptiX support for GPU rendering workflows.
“Less than a year ago we introduced NVIDIA RTX and momentum for real-time ray tracing continues to grow,” says Greg Estes, vice president corporate marketing and developer programs at NVIDIA. “We worked closely with Luxion on OptiX integration to make real-time ray tracing on the GPU possible. Now KeyShot users have more options to interactively create amazing, photoreal visuals faster and easier than ever before.”
“Luxion has evaluated GPU rendering for several years,” says Henrik Wann Jensen, Co-founder and Chief Scientist at Luxion. “With NVIDIA’s RTX technology, GPU-accelerated hardware ray tracing and AI denoising, gigaray performance, GPUs with over 8GB of memory, and the free OptiX SDK, now is the time to do it.”
The Best of Both Worlds
Luxion has implemented NVIDIA RTX with OptiX into KeyShot with native, out-of-the-box support for all the technological achievements provided through the NVIDIA OptiX ray tracing engine – GPU acceleration does not require a separate KeyShot installation, a plugin, or a patch. It’s the best of both worlds inside KeyShot, CPU and GPU together, all within the most intuitive user interface for 3D rendering and animation allow the user to make their decision based on their hardware needs.
“KeyShot was finely tuned for OptiX integration,” explains Claus Wann Jensen, Co-founder and CEO at Luxion. “Our development team was able to quickly show KeyShot with GPU acceleration and where performance could be gained, which further convinced us to move forward with support for NVIDIA RTX.”
How It Works
Starting KeyShot from your computer it now detects a compatible NVIDIA GPU and if it finds one it will present KeyShot users with a new GPU button on the KeyShot Ribbon. When activated, the scene in the Real-time View and the rendered output will be rendered on the GPU instead of CPU.
“It’s important that the implementation of NVIDIA GPU acceleration was seamless,” explains Derek Cicero, VP of Product and Strategy at Luxion. “A single button, a single click. It’s that simple. When you want real-time rendering using your CPUs, use your CPUs. When you want to use your GPUs, use your GPUs. It’s all up to the KeyShot user.”
Availability, Pricing and Product Support
KeyShot with GPU acceleration leveraging NVIDIA RTX with OptiX will be available with the release of KeyShot 9, currently in beta and planned for release in the Fall of 2019. A separate installation of KeyShot will not be required and no additional cost is added to the price of KeyShot. GPU acceleration for NVIDIA RTX is currently supported on Windows only. Supported graphics cards include NVIDIA GeForce, Quadro, and Tesla products with Maxwell and newer generation GPUs.
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