Inventor 2023 - GPU Ray Tracing

By Shaun Griffiths

In the Inventor 2023 release, you are now able to try the new GPU Ray Tracing feature. This allows you to utilise your graphics card to render within the viewport, rather than the CPU renderer (ART).

To access this, you can go to your Application Options > Hardware > Enable Viewport GPU Ray
Tracing.

However, you do need to be aware that there are GPU requirements, which can be found on the link below:

https://help.autodesk.com/view/INVNTOR/2023/ENU/?guid=GUID-541FB861-54C5-4D90-851F-575EFC15EC0C

In short, the GPU Ray Tracing feature requires support from the Direct X Raytracing feature (DXR) introduced in recent versions of Windows 10. Therefore, a selection of GPUs is currently supported.

Nonetheless, if you meet the current requirements, you can give it a try.

To Ray Trace within the model viewport, you need to go to the View tab and in the Appearance panel, change your visual style to realistic. Then the Ray Tracing option will be available.

Using the original ART renderer, you may expect to see a rendered viewport like below. Here, you can set the quality to be Low, Draft or High. This will recalculate if the model or view moves.

The new GPU option produces a ray traced viewport much quicker than the ART, especially when noise reduction is selected.

However, this may come at the cost of image quality. Nonetheless, this is an active area of development.

Despite the speed, there are some known limitations, a few of which I have highlighted below.

In the first example, we can see that the lighting may change, but also ground shadows and cosmetic threads are not currently supported, as of initial release.

Also, for some appearances with textures applied, the model may become more or less transparent.

Despite some of these limitations, the speed and realism that comes with some appearances provides an additional means to generate images for design representation, even while this feature is in a pre-release stage.

For more information, please visit the link above, or contact us here at Cadline.