KeyShot 2.1 adds GPU power to enable realtime ray traced subsurface scattering

I’ve been waiting for this since it was demoed in the AMD booth at SIGGRAPH 2010: KeyShot 2.1 adds GPU support to it’s real-time rendering raytracing and global illumination engine.  Until now, KeyShot has supported multiple CPUs, but now it supports the FirePro GPUs to maximize rendering speed and performance.

At SIGGRAPH, Luxion was demonstrating realtime ray traced subsurface scattering on a FirePro V8800 - basically they can render realistic natural translucent materials such as human skin, plants, windows interactively, in realtime, without any approximations.  The graphic in this post is of a fully interactive raytraced human head with subsurface scattering, where the skin is rendered using the true optical properties of human skin.

SolidSmack has a great review of KeyShot 2. With 2.1 now out, this is really the rendering software to beat (sorry Bunkspeed).

Update Oct 4  See the review of 2.1 on SolidSmack.

Update Oct 7 Check out the review of KeyShot 2.1 on Develop3D.  Here’s the great summary: ” I tthink it’s one of the best products in the world of technology for those involved in product development. Not just in rendering circles, but in general. After all, if you’ve got a job to do, you need to do it well, in a timely manner and as efficiently as possible. That’s what a tool should do. And KeyShot, frankly, excels.

And in reference to the new GPU-acceleration features: Many of these [other GPU-based simulation products] have proprietary requirements for the GPU in use such as NVIDIA’s Cuda architecture but KeyShot doesn’t. if your workstation or laptop has a GPU in place, it’ll work and have the following effect calculated separately both in real time mode and when rendering out a final pass.