Blender 2.78 Is Adding Pascal Support, Fixes Maxwell Performance Issues

Version 2.78 of the Blender open-source modeling software is coming soon and it adds NVIDIA Pascal support on top of fixing some Maxwell performance issues.

In some Blender CUDA benchmarks I posted a few months ago it showed how for some workloads high-end Maxwell cards like the GTX 980 Ti and GTX TITAN X were performing abnormally... The results were accurate and it turned out to be a bug in Blender:

This issue for cards like the GTX 980 Ti and GTX TITAN X is fixed for the upcoming Blender 2.78. Additionally, it adds support for the GeForce GTX 1060 / 1070 / 1080 Pascal cards. Thanks to a Phoronix reader for pointing out the issue has been fixed for Blender 2.78.

On the CUDA front, Blender 2.78 also uses less per-thread memory that is said to reduce the base memory required to render an empty scene by 50%. There's also now support for float4 textures with OpenCL devices, CUDA support for bindless textures, and CPU/CUDA support for single float and byte textures.

Outside of the GPU space, Blender 2.78 has more optimizations, viewport improvements, and more when it comes to the Cycles renderer. See tentative details here. Those wanting to try out Blender 2.78 can currently check out the latest test build ahead of the official release.