Reference/Release Notes/2.92/Cycles

= Blender 2.92: Cycles =

Performance

 * Multithreaded export of geometry, to improves performance in scene synchronization when there are many mesh, hair and volume objects.

GPU Rendering

 * GPU devices can now take over tiles that are currently being rendered by CPU threads to improve hybrid rendering performance.
 * NVIDIA OptiX
 * Hybrid rendering with CPU and GPU devices is now supported.
 * AO and Bevel shader nodes are now supported.
 * NVIDIA driver version must be 450 or newer, due to an upgrade to OptiX 7.1. This makes it possible to render more object instances.
 * Intel Iris and Xe GPUs can now be enabled for OpenCL rendering.

Volumes

 * Volume rendering is significantly more memory efficient, by using a sparse NanoVDB grid. Results are highly dependent on the volume shape. With one a production volume asset memory usage was reduced 3x, at the cost of 10% longer render time.

Shaders

 * Attribute Node (new features shared with EEVEE):
 * Alpha output socket that returns the alpha channel of the attribute when available.
 * Options to access built-in and custom properties of the object or mesh datablock, or of the instancer particle system or object. This makes it possible to add user controlled variation to materials on instances.

Baking

 * Baking to vertex colors is now supported, in addition to image textures.
 * The baking panel is now enabled when OptiX is active (baking will execute with CUDA however).