First Commercial Renderer with NVIDIA RTX Ray Tracing Delivers up to 19x Speedups

From cityscapes to 3D characters, Isotropix Clarisse accelerates workflows for artists and animators.
April 26, 2019 by Nicole Castro

Real-time ray tracing enables artists to receive instantaneous feedback on every aspect of their designs — from geometry to shading to lighting.

Now, NVIDIA and Isotropix are making this capability available through Clarisse, graphics software used by visual effects and animation studios worldwide.

Isotropix Clarisse iFX 4.0 SP2, released today, is the latest update of the high-end 3D content and production renderer. It’s the first generally available commercial renderer to offer NVIDIA OptiX ray tracing powered by NVIDIA RTX technology.

With NVIDIA RTX, artists can solely focus on pushing the boundaries of creativity. — Isotropix CEO Sam Assadian

With GPU-accelerated power in Clarisse, studios can design production scenes made of hundreds of billions of polygons in real time, at speeds up to 19x faster than on a CPU.

RTX and OptiX Accelerate Creative Workflow on Clarisse

At the recent GPU Technology Conference, Isotropix showed multiple scenes and animations to showcase how RTX boosts Clarisse workflows.

Isotropix’s example of Neo Tokyo consists of 288 million geometries and nearly 11 billion polygons. On a CPU system, the scene can be displayed at five frames per second. But with NVIDIA RTX, artists can manipulate the production scene at over 50 FPS.

Image courtesy of Isotropix.

In a detailed image of Florence, Italy, with over 1 billion geometries and 453 billion polygons, Isotropix showed how artists could manipulate the complex production scene at over 18 FPS in full HD — 12x faster than a CPU.

Image courtesy of Mickael Riciotti.

“The integration of NVIDIA RTX on Clarisse brings impressive speeds and instant feedback to artists, so they can visualize and edit graphics in real time,” said Sam Assadian, CEO of Isotropix. “This results in more iterations, so studios have more time to make production scenes and animated shots look even better.”

With the OptiX API using RTX technology, artists can achieve optimal ray-tracing performance on the GPU.

Isotropix was also the first to offer Optix AI-based denoiser into a commercial renderer. The OptiX AI denoising technology combined with NVIDIA Tensor Cores deliver a powerful performance while decreasing render times to get noise-free final images.

The latest version of Clarisse is available to download.

Learn more in the video below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uw2Ceo3loRs&feature=youtu.be